Ted’s Devious Health Insurance Adventure - By Michael Tomasky

Did Cruz really sign up for Obamacare hoping the Supreme Court would nix the subsidies, giving him a ready-made horror story? Yeah, probably.

There are just so many interesting questions about Ted Cruz, are there not? Okay, maybe not that many. But the one of keenest interest by far to me is: Does he really think he can get away with manufacturing a fake personal Obamacare horror story and peddle it in Dogpatch and get votes with it?

Here’s the situation. Cruz’s wife, Heidi, recently took a leave of absence from her big Wall Street job at Goldman Sachs. The Cruz family was on her health plan. Cruz announced with fanfare and to much amusement about two weeks ago that he and the family would be going on Obamacare, over which he singlehandedly shut down the federal government and whose every word he has vowed 18,674 times to repeal.

There has been lots of speculation about why. Bloomberg’s Dave Weigel wrote on March 24 that Cruz, in saying he was choosing Obamacare because he wanted to “follow the text of the law,” was “contrasting his sacrifice with the law-dodging ruthlessness of the Obama administration.” Then last week Brian Beutler upped the ante, laying out the following a new theory in The New Republic.

Cruz, he wrote, wants to go on Obamacare in the hope that the Supreme Court, in the King v. Burwell case, rules against the federal subsidies. Such a decision would end the subsidies in states that did not set up their own health-care exchanges. Texas, where Cruz is officially domiciled, is one of those states. If the subsidies are struck down, premiums in states like Texas are expected to shoot up. That means Ted Cruz’s premiums will shoot up. Thus, he’ll have a personal Obamacare nightmare to retail on the stump. Pure gold.

Lest you think I’m being conspiratorial, and this is too devious and twisted even for the mind of Ted Cruz, hear me out on this point: There would appear to be no reason that Cruz had to choose Obamacare. The Cruz family in all likleihood had two other options. First, they could presumably have continued his wife’s Goldman Sachs coverage through COBRA, the law that allows ex-employees of a workplace to keep that workplace health coverage for 18 months provided they pay for all of it.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/06/ted-s-devious-health-insurance-adventure.html