Politico reported that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will issue a ruling next week that will allow the federal government to subsidize the insurance plans Congressmen and their aides will be forced to buy on government healthcare exchanges due to Obamacare.
The news came just hours after the Heritage Foundation released an embargoed study to reporters that found there was no legal way for the administration to offer subsidies for Members of Congress and their aides without passing a legislative “fix.”
The Obama administration may have tried to preempt the release of that study; one of the study’s co-authors insisted to Breitbart News on Friday that no matter how creative the Obama administration gets, there does not seem to be a legal manner in which the federal government can grant the Obamacare subsidies.
Ed Haislmaier and Robert E. Moffitt, both of whom are Senior Research Fellows in the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, and Joseph A. Morris, an attorney in private practice who served as General Counsel of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985, co-authored the study, titled, “Congress in the Obamacare Trap: No Easy Escape.”
Haislmaier emphasized to Breitbart News that “we don’t see a legal avenue, no matter how creative, for them.”
“We don’t know what they will come out with, or how they will try to to justify it,” he told Breitbart News. “If they do produce, then we will have a regulation to dissect.”
As the Heritage Foundation’s Rob Bluey wrote on “The Foundry,” it is indeed curious that “word of the Obama Administration ‘solving’ Congress’ problem was suddenly leaked to a couple reporters at 9 p.m. — just hours before the release of Heritage’s report (embargoed copies of which had been given to the media).”
The Administration’s strategy appears to be one of deliberately flouting the law, in the belief that it can get away with it because Congress will be the beneficiary and the American public won’t catch on to what they are doing. If the Administration really thinks it has a legal way under Obamacare for the federal government to continuing paying for the health care of members of Congress and their staff, why didn’t they issue the regulations at any point over the last three years?
