GOP Legislators Ejoy Rolls Royce Healthcare While Blocking Medicaid Expansion

When it comes to hypocrisy, few individuals are bigger hypocrites than Virginia Republicans in the General Assembly who are blocking Medicaid expansion - something that would bring healthcare coverage to 400,000 Virginians and create 30,000 jobs.  Why the hypocrisy?  Because even as GOP legislators seek to deny access to healthcare to 400,000 Virginians they are enjoying a gold-plated, Rolls Royce healthcare plan at taxpayer expense even though they are members of an only part time legislature.  The hypocrisy parallels that Congressional Republican who seek to kill Obamacare even as they enjoy healthcare plans that the rest of us could only wish for.  The Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the hypocrisy in the Virginia Legislature.  Here are highlights:

On Monday mornings, in the ninth-floor conference room of a Main Street tower overlooking the state Capitol, lobbyists for industry, hospitals, insurance companies, physicians and regional trade groups swap intel and plot strategy in the health care fight that is paralyzing a part-time legislature with a little-known secret: full-time, gold-plated health coverage.

Gridlock is the norm in Richmond. It has been for more than a decade. Among those contributing to this almost-continuous standoff are lawmakers who get from the government what they are insisting the government shouldn’t give others: health insurance, which, among other things, paid for the weight-reduction surgery of at least one senator.

That senator, Republican John Cosgrove, makes no a secret of his bariatric surgery. But that didn’t stop Del. Joe Morrissey, D-Henrico, from making a veiled reference to it during the House debate on health care this past Thursday. Told of the comment, Cosgrove alluded to one of Morrissey’s maladies — an incurable appetite for attention: “I never brought an AK-47 on the floor of the House. We all have our weirdnesses.”

For the General Assembly, as a whole, it’s a seeming delight in dysfunction, particularly on issues touching the most lives.

For the dozen or so lobbyists who gather in the offices of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, this means their push to fully extend Obamacare here is back to the future.

The meetings — led by chamber President Barry DuVal, a former commerce secretary to a Republican governor — are a reminder of the strained relationship between business and the Republican Party. Once natural allies, they have been rent asunder by the GOP’s subservience to anti-taxers, culture warriors and tea partyers, all of whom depict the party as subordinating ordinary people to profit-obsessed oligarchs. This clash plays out in primary contests.

The chamber-led alliance is looking for ways to pry away enough Republican votes in the House of Delegates to three-peat. Having twice loosened the leadership’s grip on the rank and file over taxes, business is going for the hat trick: arguing that a health care fix subsidized with more than $2 billion from Washington can help stabilize the economy as well as the workforce.

For Manoli Loupassi of Richmond, it could be additional restrictions on Medicaid, a health care program for the poor, which has one of the lowest fraud rates in the nation at three-tenths of 1 percent. Another possible inducement for him: How all that federal money could shore up Virginia Commonwealth University’s teaching hospital, where the demands of research and education collide with those of an impoverished urban population.

Another motivation may be humiliation; that legislators will have to publicly explain extending to themselves services they deny others.

According to the state personnel office, 104 of 140 delegates and senators and 202 of their spouses and children are covered by the government’s health plan, which last year legislators closed to part-time civil services workers to save money.

Enrolled in the state program are such Republican anti-Obamacare stalwarts as House Speaker Bill Howell of Stafford County, House Whip Todd Gilbert of Shenandoah County and Appropriations Committee Chairman Chris Jones of Suffolk.

If you want to look a hypocrite in the face, look no farther than your nearest GOP member of the Virginia General Assembly.