Certainly, the big news of this week is going to be the delaying of the Obamacare employer mandate. Strangely enough, or not, it has been delayed until 2015. Ostensibly, this is after the mid-term elections that are looming on the horizon. Coming from the Treasury Department, the announcement was a surprise to most people. I would wager it was not a surprise to the people in the administration who are in charge of implementing this disaster waiting in the wings. I suspect they have known about this for more than a few days and were waiting for the right moment to announce it. A holiday week seems like the right time to go into damage control mode.The reasons given for the delay are innocuous enough, at least on the surface. This comes from a White House blog post.
The Hill - In a White House blog post, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett wrote that the administration believed it needed to give employers “more time to comply with the new rules.”“This allows employers the time to test the new reporting systems and make any necessary adaptations to their health benefits while staying the course toward making health coverage more affordable and accessible for their workers,” Jarrett wrote Tuesday evening.Remind me again, how long has it been since Obamacare was signed into law? That would be March 2010. That means the Obama administration has had over three years to roll out the different portions of the law. By some counts, the Department of Health and Human Services has created 20,000 rules and regulations to implement Obamacare. And yet, they still haven't figured out how to make the employer mandate work. They feel the need to re-vamp and simplify a reporting process that isn't even in effect. I would contend this is another great example of why the dislike many of us have for big government is deserved. I can't help but laugh when I hear a government official make the claim that Obamacare is going to make our health care system more efficient.
Jarrett also wrote that the delay would help in “cutting red tape and simplifying the reporting process.”
“We have heard the concern that the reporting called for under the law about each worker’s access to and enrollment in health insurance requires new data collection systems and coordination,” Jarrett said. “So we plan to re-vamp and simplify the reporting process.”
The employer mandate isn't the only part of Obamacare that is in trouble. Even Senator Max Baucus, one of the principle authors of the legislation, sees the train wreck that is coming down the road. The health care exchanges are set to start operation on October 1, 2013, but no one is really sure how they are going to work. Once they were given the opportunity, many states have opted out of the exchanges. Their primary concern is the cost of the program. That concern is legitimate, given the states can not simply print more money out of thin air.
Could it be that the Obama administration has seen this coming for months? Is it possible they are now bowing to the pressure they are feeling from the companies that are under the employer mandate? Maybe they are giving political cover to the Democratic members of Congress who they feel are vulnerable in the 2014 mid-term elections? How the delay of the employer mandate would provide political cover escapes me, given that many of the Democrats in question were responsible for shoving it down our throats in the first place. I suppose that should serve to remind us of the short-term memory loss that afflicts so many voters in America.
If it sounds like I am skeptical of the motives at play with this delay, then I must be getting my point across. It has been almost four and a half years since Barack Obama moved into the White House. After watching how he operates in that time, I believe my skepticism has been well-earned.
