A conservative Maryland physician elected to Congress on an anti-Obamacare platform surprised fellow freshmen at a Monday orientation session by demanding to know why his government-subsidized health care plan takes a month to kick in.
Republican Andy Harris, an anesthesiologist who defeated freshman Democrat Frank Kratovil on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reacted incredulously when informed that federal law mandated that his government-subsidized health care policy would take effect on Feb. 1 – 28 days after his Jan. 3rd swearing-in.
“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange … “Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap,” added the aide, who was struck by the similarity to Harris’s request and the public option he denounced as a gateway to socialized medicine. (emphasis added)
Of course that’s the liberal spin for this story — Harris is demanding immediate health coverage, which is what the government “public option” would have provided for everyone … and Harris OPPOSES GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE! HYPOCRITE!!11!!1!!1!!!
But being an anesthesiologist, there is no way that Dr. Harris could not have already known the answers to the questions he was asking. My instincts tell me that he was probably being sarcastic, or perhaps indulging in a Limbaugh-type “illustrating absurdity by being absurd” exercise. The story continues:
Harris, a Maryland state senator who works at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and several hospitals on the Eastern Shore, also told the audience, “This is the only employer I’ve ever worked for where you don’t get coverage the first day you are employed,” his spokeswoman Anna Nix told POLITICO … Nix said Harris, who is the father of five, wasn’t being hypocritical – he was just pointing out the inefficiency of government-run health care.
It’s also worth remembering that the senior Democrat staffers who wrote the Obamacare bill exempted themselves from its coverage mandates, presumably in order to keep the current “Cadillac” health insurance coverage now available to Congressmen, congressional staff, and high-ranking employees at government agencies … which pretty much neutralizes any complaints by liberals about hypocrisy.
It seems to me that a lot of bitter liberals just got punked by a freshman Republican member of the House. Good one, Dr. Harris.
