Here's more, from Keith Olbermann:
Balt. Sun: During a briefing Monday on employee benefits for new congressmen, staff aides and family members, Representative-elect Andy Harris wanted to know why he would have to wait a month for his new health insurance coverage to start. "This is the only employer I've ever worked for where you don't get coverage the first day you are employed," Harris said, according to his spokeswoman, Anna Nix. She was quoted by Politico, the Capitol Hill newspaper that broke the story.
What helped make the exchange irresistible for Washington reporters was Harris's background as a physician, his recent arrival on the scene and his strong opposition to the new health care law, which he'd like to see repealed.
The initial Politico report, said the Baltimore County Republican "surprised fellow freshmen" by "demanding" the insurance information, and reacted "incredulously" when told he couldn't get coverage starting Jan. 3, when the new Congress is to be sworn in.
In fact, the health insurance plan at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where Harris has worked since the 1980s, does cover employees from the first day of employment. That provision makes the Hopkins plan more generous than most...
According to Politico, when Harris, a married father of five, learned he wouldn't get health insurance from Day One, he asked the two women who were conducting the benefits briefing if he could purchase coverage from the government to fill the gap, according to Politico.
The concept reminded the paper's anonymous source of the "public option that [Harris] denounced as a gateway to socialized medicine" during the debate over the 2010 health care overhaul law that Harris opposes.
"As the only physician in the Maryland state Senate, I know how legislatures approach health care issues," Harris wrote in an op-ed article last year for the Daily Times of Salisbury. "Politicians are usually tone-deaf to those who know the most about the issue: patients and their health care providers."
One of the first salvos came from the camp of Democratic Rep. Frank Kratovil, "Despite railing against the evils of government-subsidized health care for the last two years, Andy Harris chose to introduce himself on the national stage yesterday by demanding earlier access to his taxpayer-subsidized government health care benefits, and expressing shock that he would instead be treated like all other federal employees in having to wait 30 days for his coverage to kick in," Kratovil aide Kevin Lawlor said in an email. "It has taken Rep.-Elect Harris less than two weeks to start grabbing national headlines for his arrogance and sense of entitlement."
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