Exposing the Obamacare Scheme That Gave Congress a Health Care 'Bailout'

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump has turned up the heat on House and Senate members to fix the broken health care system.

In a recent tweet, he told members to come up with a new health care bill or join the millions of Americans living under Obamacare who are struggling with skyrocketing premiums and limited health insurance choices. And his threat is not an empty one:

If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2017

Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment, says the "bailouts" President Trump is referring to are very real and worth about 12,000 taxpayer dollars per year for each lawmaker. And he says there's some questionable history on how these bailouts came into effect.

In 2009, when lawmakers were debating Obamacare, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, put forth an amendment calling for congressional employees to subject themselves to insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The amendment was unanimously adopted.

"The whole point of this provision was to make them feel the pain if it didn't work," Kerpen said in an interview Wednesday with CBN's Pat Robertson.

One flaw in the final Senate bill was that the amendment did not include employer contributions. Consequently, when Obamacare passed, it terminated coverage that members and their staff previously had through the Federal Employee Health Benefit program, which subsidized about 75 percent of their health care plans.

Kerpen explains this "put them in the exact same situation as the people, we've since learned, who were most severely financially squeezed by Obamacare: people who don't have employer coverage and make too much money to qualify for subsidies."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Democrats say that not specifying what would happen to employer contributions in the final bill "was merely a copy-editing mistake." The WSJ article says a meltdown ensued as lawmakers feared "staffers would be exposed to thousands of dollars more in annual health care costs, replete with predictions that junior aides would clean out their desks en masse." 

Senate Democrats met with President Barack Obama in 2013 to address this problem. After the meeting, Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to issue a rule qualifying both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate as small businesses, which is a label legally only given to businesses with less than 50 employees.

Kerpen says one person filed "blatantly false documents," which were obtained by Judicial Watch, in order to sign up 12,000 people in an exchange that should only apply to companies with 50 employees or fewer.

Smoking gun: Obama's OPM scheme to give Congress employer contributions depends on these blatantly false documents. https://t.co/XnVGFUi3E9 pic.twitter.com/sgJK4sqRkV

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) July 30, 2017

"This fraud of instructing Congress to masquerade as a small business is the key to the bailout scheme because if members of Congress and their staff had signed up for Obamacare under the individual exchange, they would have had to pay their own premiums," Kerpen charged.

When President Trump threatens to end the bailouts for members of Congress for Obamacare, he is threatening to direct the OPM to reverse Obama's regulation allowing employer contributions to exchange plans.

If this rule is reversed, members and their staff would lose their government-funded subsidies and be subjected to paying the premiums people without employer coverage have to pay that make too much money to qualify for subsidies.

"This is mandatory work they've got to get done for the American people," Kerpen said.