Wilson and other Republicans were reacting to the administration’s decision to delay a piece of the law saying companies must provide health insurance to workers or face a fine of $2,000 per worker. Republicans said last week that delaying enforcement until 2015 appears to be aimed at getting through the 2014 elections without complaints from companies, and repeated those charges on the House floor Monday.
{mosads}”Last week, the president chose to blatantly ignore his own law by putting off the employer mandate until 2015,” Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) said. “There’s no waiver procedure in the bill, so I guess Sen. [Harry] Reid [D-Nev.] didn’t think it important when he was crafting the bill behind closed doors.
“It just puts it off to a more politically convenient time, beyond the 2014 midterm elections.”
Since last week’s decision to delay enforcement of the employer mandate, several Republicans have said Obama had no authority to delay this, and Republicans on the House Ways & Means Committee will hold a subcommittee hearing Wednesday to explore the issue further.
Pitts said the delay of this piece makes the law even more confusing, and said all confusion about the law should be eliminated by eliminating the law itself. Pitts added that because there is no waiver in the law, Obama has “chosen to break his own law.”
Wilson and Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) also complained that on Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services released a rule saying states that run their own health insurance exchanges will not have to check the eligibility of applicants until 2015.
Under the law, people are only eligible for subsidized insurance through the exchanges up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Burgess said delaying eligibility checks on these applicants will subject these state-run programs to fraud.
“How will the government determine who gets healthcare subsidies? They’re going to use the honor system because no one would lie about something like that,” Burgess said sarcastically.
“This will open the exchanges to a staggering amount of potential fraud,” he added. “It is also clearly a political move. The administration has made it clear that they want as many people as possible to sign up for the exchanges so they can reap the public relations benefits of talking about the popularity of said exchanges.”
The House earlier this year passed legislation to repeal the 2010 law, but that bill will not be considered in the Democratic Senate.