Texas Senator Ted Cruz, in an attempt to defund Obamacare, spearheaded the Capitol Hill standoff that has now shuttered the government for 16 days and steered the country to the brink of debt default. His speech writer, Amanda Carpenter, last night complained on Twitter that her current health care plan is set to expire in two months and she’s not sure what she’ll have to pay for coverage come January. “This. Is. Awful.” she Tweeted.
Colorado political observers will recognize this as a Rep. Cory Gardner-style dig at Obamacare. As media outlets here, including the Colorado Independent, discovered, as was the case with Gardner, all Carpenter has had to do over the last 16 days — time she has been furloughed due to the Cruz standoff — is to open her computer and surf to an Obamacare exchange website. It may be buggy. It could take her a few hours, but she can order a new health insurance plan, and likely a better plan than she has now.
Brad Friedman, who first reported the Carpenter tweet at the Brad Blog, does a good job explaining why Carpenter is having the “awful” trouble she’s having:
“Congressional staffers are being forced to buy their health care on the Affordable Care Act exchanges because Republicans in the Senate added that requirement in an amendment during the fight over the ACA’s passage in 2010, hoping that it would be a poison pill to kill the bill. The Democrats called their bluff and said, ‘Okay, fine.’ And now Carpenter is whining about the uncertainty it appears to be causing her.”
He adds in an update:
“With Fitch issuing a warning tonight that they may soon be forced to downgrade the U.S. government’s AAA credit rating, thanks to the GOP’s Cruz-inspired threats to default on the debt limit, maybe Carpenter will soon have the chutzpah to whine about the drop in value of her 401k plan.”
