House Republicans voted Tuesday to exempt former Obamacare enrollees from the individual mandate if they lose insurance due to the collapse of one of the federally-backed markets.
And while President Obama threatened to veto the bill if it reaches his desk, 16 Democrats joined with Republicans to pass the bill, which passed 258-165.
Most Democrats argued that the exemption was unnecessary, and said some markets are closing because Republicans have blocked federal subsidies to the insurance companies. But Republicans embraced the opportunity to highlight an unpopular provision of the law.
“This is a short, simple bill with a basic premise — if you are a consumer who complied with the ACA’s individual mandate by purchasing health insurance through one of the Consumer Oriented and Operated Plans, or CO-OPs, created under the law, and your plan was terminated mid-year by the failure of that CO-OP, you shouldn’t be liable for the individual mandate for the remainder of that calendar year,” Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., the original sponsor of the bill, said during a Ways and Means Committee hearing earlier this month.
Seventeen of the 23 Obamacare co-ops have failed, despite receiving $1.7 billion in taxpayer funding. But the GOP legislation left Democrats crying foul. “If they would cooperate, if they would refine, if they would try and solve problems rather than creating new ones we could make it work even better,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said on the House floor.
House Republicans touted the bill as a simple way to shelter people from the penalties imposed by the individual mandate. “It’s bad enough people are left without insurance because of the failures of Obamacare, but why should we have the IRS punish them on top of that,” Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., asked during the floor debate.
Democrats insisted that the law already allows people to apply for exemptions from the mandate. Blumenauer also accused Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., of causing the failures by including language in the 2014 year-end spending bill that eliminated “a taxpayer-funded bailout for insurance companies,” as Rubio put it. Without that money, insurance companies couldn’t cover the losses accrued from providing coverage to expensive patients.
“That took away money that those people had been promised, that they needed and were depending on and so we precipitated a crisis like we’ve seen with other areas with attacking the Affordable Care Act,” Blumenauer said.
Rubio touted the provision as a way of protecting taxpayers. “Taxpayers should not have to fund massive bailouts to protect the profits of the insurance companies that helped write Obamacare, which is why I’ve been fighting for over a year to protect taxpayers from yet another bailout that puts them on the hook for Washington’s mistakes,” he said last year.
Obama’s administration has hinted that it might try to get around that restriction by using the government’s “Judgment Fund” to pay insurance companies that sue the federal government over the loss of the subsidies. “This is an obligation of the federal government,” Mandy Cohen, chief operating officer of the Department of Health and Human Services, said of the payments during a recent House hearing.
