Proposal would end federal health benefits plan
By Alex M. Parker aparker@govexec.com September 23, 2009
Several of the more than 500 amendments the Senate Finance Committee is facing as it begins a marathon markup of health care reform legislation would affect public servants' health coverage -- and one would end the federal government's health insurance program.
The provision, offered by ranking member Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, would force civil servants to leave the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and purchase insurance through the state-based health exchanges that are a centerpiece of the health reform bill. Employees would move to the exchanges beginning in 2013.
The idea behind the amendment is "to require that elected officials and federal employees purchase insurance in the same manner proposed in the [bill] for private citizens," according to a summary on the Finance Committee's Web site.
Representatives from Grassley's office did not return calls for comment.
[link in original]
Somehow, lowering the federal decency standard of government funded healthcare availability to a level playing field of insurance-industry dominated enhanced but ongoing indecency, making the indecency universal, is not how the Obama promise [not a suggestion but a promise] came across, not with the verbal inflection he gave it, and this is Grassly being who he is. Yet he is being himself in a way that highlights the promise Obama made, despite Obama being in retrenchment mode, concerning that promise as pivotal.
Good might come of the Grassly proposal. The public employees union knows how to squeal loudly when they care to; and about this they might care.
Let's hear a howl from the bureaucrats, arising from their niche cubicles like days of old, ready to the barricades to face the thuggish Pinkertons if needed in order to gain collective labor aims.
Visions of the Wobblies. All that. As in days of yore, when men were men and would get up, stand up, stand up for their rights. Not giving up the fight. Standing for what's right.
_______________
And because like Joe Wilson I criticize Obama's veracity, am I a racist? I like what Conyers and Ellison are cosponsoring, HR 676, the single-payer universal coverage "Medicare for All" proposal. I like every cosponsor of that effort, whatever their race or religion. I liked Obama's promise. Retrenchment (if not total abandonment of it) is what I do not like. It's not race, it's promise keeping. Veracity. Credibility. Progressivism. It is as if when the one South Carolina Rep., not Wilson, earlier said there'd be an effort to make this Obama's "Waterloo" that Obama began glancing back for a quick exit route off center stage. Live to fight another day, I suppose, is good politics. But it rankles. Going back on a promise suggests political expediency trumps commitment.