Does the health care bill specifically exempt members of Congress and their staffs from its provisions?
No. This twisted claim is based on misrepresentations of the House and Senate bills, neither of which exempts lawmakers. We’ve received many questions about claims that House and Senate members would be exempt from the health care legislation taking shape in Congress. But neither the House nor the Senate bill exempts Congress from its provisions. Members of Congress are subject to the legislation’s mandate to have insurance, and the plans available to them must meet the same minimum benefit standards that other insurance plans will have to meet. “All plans would have to follow those requirements by 2019,” Aaron Albright, press secretary for the House Committee on Education and Labor, told FactCheck.org. “People actually believe we wrote in the bill that Congress exempts itself from these requirements. That falsehood has been going around since the very beginning.” How did the notion of an “exemption” get started? So far as we can find, the first to make the “exempt” claim was columnist
