AEI, David Frum: Ex-Bush Speechwriter Will Lose Health Benefits

Talk about a two-fer. In one stroke, David Frum has become not only the poster boy for the Republican party’s incoherent tantrums, but for the need for Obamacare itself! It doesn’t get more delicious than this.

AEI hits David Frum where it hurts

Those Republican brutes! It’s bad enough not to tolerate David Frum’s dissent on health care -- especially since his judgments have been stunningly correct. But in ousting him after a mad overnight revolt among its donors, the American Enterprise Institute has put Frum’s family into precisely the health care hell that Obamacare seeks to remedy. What many people don’t realize about the think tank world is that the policy types who serve as modestly paid fellows do so in large part for the health coverage. In our antiquated employer-based system, middle-aged wonks simply have to be attached to a group to be insurable. If you and your spouse have reached your 40s and have had even modest health bumps along the way, you'll never be able to get coverage in the pre-Obamacare individual market (as my wife and I discovered and documented in this New York Times Magazine piece a few years ago).
Luckily for the Frums, big government is here to save them. (Frum and I are friendly, by the way – he served for several years as the “right” on “Left, Right & Center,” the public radio program on which I’m the “center”). One existing government program, COBRA, assures that the Frums can stay on AEI’s health plan for 18 months, though they’ll have to foot the bill now for the full family premium (without AEI picking up the typical employer’s 70 percent of the tab). But the better news is that once Obamacare’s new insurance exchanges are up and running in 2014, the Frums – and the other 300 million of us – will never have to worry about being shut out of insurance coverage because AEI doesn’t like what we say. Of course, if the Frums move to Massachusetts, they can get coverage from Mitt Romney’s health-care exchange right away – thanks to the pioneering 2005 reform that Romney, consumed by presidential ambition, keeps trying, inexplicably, to disavow.
Talk about a two-fer. In one stroke, David Frum has become not only the poster boy for the Republican party’s incoherent tantrums, but for the need for Obamacare itself! It doesn’t get more delicious than this.
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