When a gotcha’s not a gotcha

Republicans, trying to pull themselves up from their shutdown malfeasance, chortled last week that they had nabbed a “gotcha” moment on U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor.

I hereby award them a half-point in political game-playing. I do so on a semantical technicality.

They don’t much deserve it, but I am starting to feel sorry for them.

It all hinges on what the meaning of “delay” is.

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Here is the issue: There were myriad cluttered continuing spending resolutions that House Republicans passed a couple of weeks ago and sent to the Senate while knowing the Senate wouldn’t accept them. It was a charade by which the House Republicans forced the government to shut down pointlessly.One of those several resolutions was cluttered with a single provision to delay all of Obamacare for a year.

Another would have delayed the individual mandate to buy insurance for a year while also robbing congressional employees of their employer health-insurance contributions.

The Democratic-controlled Senate rejected those, like all the others. Majority Leader Harry Reid explained that Democrats would not pay ransom to hostage-takers trying to abuse the budget process to weaken the signature Democratic policy reform that Republicans couldn’t beat fair and square.

Pryor voted with the majority to reject.

Last week, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, sent the White House a letter.

She suggested that, since the federal government website for buying insurance on the health-care exchange had been such a debacle, then the enrollment period should be extended as a public convenience. She invoked some unspecified period beyond the March deadline.

Pryor spoke up to say he deemed Shaheen’s suggestion a logically worthy one.

Aha, cried Republicans.

They professed to catching Pryor advocating the very position-delaying the individual mandate-that he had opposed only days before.

Why, he had let the government shut down to avoid simple fairness he now embraced, they said.

Let’s be clear: That’s not so.

For one thing, Pryor and the Senate never got a continuing resolution merely delaying the individual mandate. There was other clutter.

For another, Pryor is still in favor of the individual mandate. He wants the enrollment period, now in effect, to continue. He simply likes another senator’s idea to add time only because of the fluidly emerging circumstance of disgraceful failings of the website.

Here is a quick and handy analogy: Is taxation delayed if you get an extension to file your annual return?

No. Taxation is still in effect. You will still have to pay all your taxes. You are simply getting more time to get your stuff together.

Disagree? Then try this: Petition for a tax-filing extension next year and tell the Internal Revenue Service that you intend for no income taxes to be levied against you during the period of extension.

Pryor’s positions do not conflict, but mesh. They are awash in logic.

But if Republicans want to chortle that they’ve caught him in …. well, what, exactly-being in favor of something now that he was against before? Fine.

Based on the similarity of meanings-of delay and extension-I award a snooker advantage to Republicans.

High-fives to the GOP.

All of this was further complicated last week-as things inevitably are with Obamacare-by a White House decision to extend otherwise, in a way, the signup period.

As it turned out, someone waiting until the end of March as allowed by law to buy insurance on the exchange, with the coverage to take effect April 1, conceivably could face the fine for noncompliance. That’s because noncompliance is defined as going any parts of three months of the year without health insurance.

So the White House said that would be fixed administratively. And that got reported as an extension.

Again, you can call it an extension, or you can call it a fix, or you can call it logic. And you may make your political plays as you choose.

None of that amounts to anything. What really matters is that resisters of Obamacare hold the power to kill it.

Doing so would cost them potentially thousands of dollars in tax penalties, depending on their incomes. It would risk their bankruptcy if they go without health insurance and then get seriously ill. It would burden the health-care system with their costs.

But if people simply fail to comply with the individual mandate-and burden themselves with those tax penalties and insolvency risks-then the actuaries will notice the anemic premium income and adjust rates upward next year.

Thus the program would become less affordable to the people and to the subsidizing government. We’d have ourselves what the insurance industry calls a death spiral.

If we are hell-bent on killing Obamacare, we hold the dangerous tool.

That’s not semantics. It’s nuts, the meaning of which should be unambiguous.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.