'Fixing' Obamacare to suit the clergy

The need to feed The Crazy will cost the GOP

By Jonathan Bernstein, WashPost, Updated: June 17, 2013

Could the Republican need to obsessively oppose Obamacare, even if the alternative is something that they themselves would regard as improving it, run smack into the priorities of their allies — and leave clergy, of all groups, paying the price?

That’s the potential outcome of a good reported story by Ann Kim and Ed Kilgore today. The story is that the details of the Affordable Care Act are causing trouble for clergy and other church employees:

Without the requested “fix,” as many as one million clergy members and church employees now enrolled in church-sponsored health plans could soon face the choice of leaving these plans (designed to meet their unique needs, such as the frequent reassignment of clergy across state lines) or losing access to the tax subsidies provided by the ACA to help lower-to-middle income Americans purchase insurance.

It’s entirely normal for legislative “fixes” to be needed once a new law gets implemented. Bill authors want to get everything right, but they also want to move legislation through Congress as quickly as they can, and sometimes no one sees that an obscure provision will prove problematic — or that a major provision needs exceptions that were not obvious at the time.

(More here.)