Senate majority leader Harry Reid is exempting valued members of his staff from the Obamacare law he was instrumental in imposing on the rest of the country. Fox News reports:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is allowing some staffers to keep their health insurance instead of making them buy it through an ObamaCare exchange, although he was one of the strongest Capitol Hill supporters of the 2010 law.
The Nevada Democrat is exercising his discretion under the president’s signature law to designate which staffers can keep their federal insurance plan and which must now purchase a policy through the District of Columbia’s health-care exchange.
However, he purportedly is the only top congressional leader to exercise that option, which resulted in sharp criticism Wednesday from Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, perhaps the staunchest ObamaCare opponent on the Hill.
“Sen. Reid’s decision to exempt his staff … is the clearest example yet of ObamaCare’s failures and Washington hypocrisy,” he said. “His staff worked to pass it and continue to promote it, now they don’t want to be part of it because it’s a disaster.”
The distinction is between personnel staff, forced onto the exchange, and leadership and committee staff, who are allowed to keep their federal plan.
As I noted here a couple of months ago (in explaining why Obamacare is an unconstitutional violation of the Origination Clause), the “Affordable” Care Act “was introduced in Congress in 2009 by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who called it the ‘Senate health care bill’ (a description still touted long afterwards on Reid’s website).” I guess if you’re living in an oligarchy it pays to be with the oligarchs.