by Sandy » Fri May 09, 2014 1:56 pm
It's ironic (and something I love to discuss with my Christian school colleagues) that a number of Christian and Catholic schools in Pennsylvania are saving all kinds of budget money by allowing their employees to go to the exchange and buy their insurance, then reimbursing them for the premiums. I'm not sure how they work that out tax wise, but apparently, the salaries are such that most teachers can get a subsidized policy from the exchange that provides much better coverage than their full priced policy does. I'm sure that the nature of politics being what it is, there are still some of them that will foot-shoot when it comes to casting a ballot, but surely they've at least got to think about it.
If the ACA is so unpopular, it is sure not evident in the advertising that candidates are doing here in PA. The Democrat running for Congress in my district has ads paid for by his committee in which he trumpets the themes of taxing the gas companies for education dollars, increasing the state budget, getting Pennsylvania into the medicare supplement, and the backdrop is photos of him shaking hands with Hillary Clinton and the President. All of the gubernatorial candidates are lining themselves up with Obama, Clinton and even Gore. If the ACA is a bad deal, it's not on the radar screen here.
We're not quite to summer yet. Unemployment has fallen to 6.3%, which makes the recovery under Obama second only to Roosevelt in terms of percentages of workers. The stock market has soared to well above twice what it was at the peak of the Bush recession. By the end of the summer, more than 10 million people will have been able to acquire insurance that didn't have it before. And with things turning in that direction, it's difficult to see what the Republicans are going to run on. Taking all of that away with budget cuts? Their old, tired, unproven theories about government spending?