President Obama, fearing what Democratic Senator Max Baucus has called ObamaCare’s implementation “train wreck,” has decided to delay by one year enforcement of the employer mandate to provide employees with health coverage. But why stop with employers? How about giving every American a get-out-of-ObamaCare-free pass?
Democrats are in a fix entirely of their own making. They conceived, wrote, negotiated with themselves, rammed through, and PARTIED when they passed the health care bill. Many of them smugly predicted that ObamaCare ensured that Democrats would hold the White House and majorities in Congress for years—maybe decades—to come.
Now they know better, regardless of the positive spin they try to put on it. Polling has continually shown the majority of Americans want ObamaCare repealed, and those numbers have started climbing even higher.
Oh, and did we mention that 2014 is an election year? Nothing like voters seeing their health insurance premiums double (here and here), or more, and their current health insurer leave the state and cancel its policies to focus voters’ attention.
And those who will be hit the hardest by those premium increase will be the young and healthy who carried the water for the Democrats in 2012. Ain’t “shared responsibility” great?
Don’t be surprised if Democratic members of Congress once again find their schedules so jammed packed during the upcoming August recess that they couldn’t possibly find any time to have a town hall meeting to listen to their constituents.
The problem with Obama’s delaying tactic is that the individual mandate and the employer mandate were supposed to be two sides of the same coin. Americans were going to be required to have health insurance or pay a penalty tax, but as a way of offloading part of those costs on the private sector, employers (with 50 or more employees) would be required to provide coverage.
Postponing the employer mandate for a year does not postpone the individual mandate. And without the employer mandate and the penalty employers must pay if they don’t provide coverage, even more employers could decide to dump their employees into the health insurance exchanges—which, incidentally, are encountering multiple start-up problems of their own and many may not be ready by Oct. 1.
The right thing to do is to repeal the legislation and start over, but that almost surely won’t happen as long as the Obamas are fundraising in the White House.
Plan B might be to press for a year’s postponement of the mandate for every American. Why should business owners have all the luck?
The problem for Democrats is they need a face-saving way to back off from the law they have for so long claimed to support. Maybe the IRS scandal that has rocked the country is just such an excuse.
The IRS is the enforcer of the insurance mandate. Given the agency’s money-wasting parties, targeting and harassment of conservative groups, lying to Congress, taking the Fifth Amendment while remaining on the public payroll—all during the Obama years, we might add—it makes sense to postpone implementation of ObamaCare for at least a year while Congress gets to the bottom of these scandals.
That approach would allow Democrats to claim there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the law they wrote and passed and praised; it’s the IRS that’s the problem. And a year’s postponement might turn into two years and so on.
There is actually a precedent for this approach. Back in the 1980s, Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts—where else?—pushed through what was supposed to be comprehensive health care reform legislation. Dukakis got the law through in time to boast about it in his 1988 campaign for the presidency against George H.W. Bush. But the law wasn’t supposed to be implemented for a few years, which got delayed, and then delayed again, and finally quietly dropped when everyone recognized it was unworkable.
Democrats looked to Massachusetts for a way into this health insurance mess, maybe they should look to the Bay State for a way out.