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Trump Must End Illegal Obamacare Payments to Congress and Insurer

via National Review by JOSH BLACKMAN

Over the weekend, President Trump fired a warning shot: “If a new HealthCare Bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!” Within moments of the tweet, Obamacare supporters discovered a new clause of the Constitution with which to thwart the president’s agenda: Goodbye Foreign Emoluments Clause, hello Take Care Clause. Under our Constitution, the president has a duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Were Mr. Trump threatening to stop making payments that are required by Obamacare, I would hop on the bandwagon. The “BAILOUTS,” however, are not part of the law the president has a duty to enforce. To faithfully execute the law, in fact, President Trump must stop these payments.

First, the White House should put an end to Congress’s special treatment under the Affordable Care Act. In 2009, Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) suggested an amendment to the health-care bill that would have prevented members of Congress and their staffs from receiving the same insurance other federal employees were eligible for; instead, they would purchase coverage on the exchange. As drafted, the provision eliminated the generous subsidies — in the form of employer contributions — that members and their staff previously received. Under the law, workers on Capitol Hill would now be put in the same position as other Americans who had to pay the full cost of their insurance.

As you can imagine, this provision proved to be very unpopular, but to this day Congress has not changed the law. Yet where Congress would not act, President Obama did so unilaterally. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced that if members of Congress and their staff purchased insurance on the District of Columbia’s small-business exchange, they would receive the same employer subsidies that had been available to them before the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Trump is exactly right that this is a “BAILOUT.” But more important, the payments are a blatantly illegal effort to bypass Grassley’s unpopular amendment.

The complete story here > President Trump Must End Illegal Obamacare Payments to Congress and Insurers


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