Obamacare must die

For the GOP's hardcore crackpot caucus there is only one overriding mission. They must kill Obamacare by any means possible and they don't care who gets hurt in the process. So this presents an interesting test for the more practical establishment GOPers.

It's inevitable a law as complicated as the ACA is going to need some tweaking. Only as the provisions go into effect will the unintended consequences resulting from the massive partisan horse trading be revealed. One such problem is the law leaves self-insured religious organizations in the lurch.

Months of outreach to Republican Senate offices by religious leaders have yielded no official GOP support to an appeal from a broad coalition of religious denominations to ensure that church-sponsored health plans can participate in the ACA’s health insurance exchanges. Worse yet, from a partisan Republican point of view, two Democratic senators, Mark Pryor and Chris Coons, were the first responders to this call, introducing legislation late last week. Pryor is widely viewed as the GOP’s number one senatorial target in 2014.

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.

I'd guess this will affect red state fundie churches even more than more liberal denominations. So the question is what are the Republicans going to do? Clearly the crackpot cons, considering they rejected a rather brilliant ploy to sabotage Obamacare simply because it would look like they were helping it succeed aren't going to agree to an actual fix. I imagine they believe they can raise some rage among the conservative congregations by allowing the inadvertent exclusion to stand.

Maybe they're right. It's not like their voters, who largely rely on Fox News, are going to be told Democrats are trying to fix the problem. How this plays out will depend largely on whether the rest of BigMedia focuses on the facts or goes for the click-bait and simply reports the controversy without the context.