By Matt Hawes
From The Daily Caller:
Congress may be fined tens of millions of dollars a year under its own health-care law, in part because the bill dumps members of Congress and their staffs from their current health-care plans.
But no one really knows for sure what the bill does, not even the experts. For instance, exactly who qualifies as an “employer” – and therefore is subject to fines up to $3,000 per employee – is undefined in the bill.
If Congress were subject to a $3,000 fine for each of its employees, it would need to shell out approximately $50 million each year to Uncle Sam. Congress’s research arm, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), informally confirmed the possibility to Republican aides….
The uncertainties surrounding the health-care law for just Congress’s health-care coverage are driving questions about how the rest of America will fare when its provisions kick into turbo in coming years.
“This is just terribly written legislation,” Lungren said, attributing many of the “drafting errors” and such to the unorthodox process by which the law was passed. “I doubt that when the senators voted on the bill they thought that was going to be the completed project. They needed to get their number of votes and they were going to do it whatever way they could and then anticipated a conference that somehow would have worked out the differences between the House and the Senate version. And because we had so few votes in both the House and the Senate, they did this other thing.”…