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Obamacare is so helpful, so ready for action, so vital to the nation’s health, that… the Obama Administration is delaying another major part of it.
News broke yesterday that the Administration is delaying the employer mandate, which would force businesses with 50 or more full-time workers to provide government-approved insurance, until 2015.
When Obamacare was engineered, the Administration and its allies in Congress made sure that the major parts affecting all Americans would be delayed until after the 2012 presidential election. Now, however, the Obama Administration is delaying one of the most well-known elements of Obamacare until after the 2014 midterm congressional election.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, described the announcement as “deviously brilliant,” even as Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett assured people that this merely means the Administration is “listening” to our concerns.
But Obamacare bombshells are dropping daily. Health insurance companies are exiting the market. Premiums could double.
And even the Obama Administration has had to admit things aren’t going too well. Heritage expert Robert Moffit listed just a few of the recent stops in this train wreck’s path:
Last year, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Katherine Sebelius announced her department could not implement the long-term care component of Obamacare. Financially, she said, it was simply not workable. And [in April] Sebelius announced that she was postponing a program designed to allow small businesses to offer more than one plan for their workers. Meanwhile, more than half the states have declined to set up a “health insurance exchange” under the burdensome terms and conditions of the law, leaving it to Washington to do it for them.
Yesterday’s news makes the countdown to the health insurance exchanges—which are supposed to open October 1 of this year—all the more interesting. Will more employers drop coverage, telling workers they’ll be able to get coverage through the exchanges? Will the exchanges work?
Don’t forget that the individual mandate still kicks in on January 1, 2014. All Americans will have to buy government-approved health insurance or pay a fine. And the employer mandate won’t be there to force employers to provide it.
Though the Administration is running amok, Congress can do something to rein it in. As Heritage expert Chris Jacobs wrote yesterday:
It is hard to understate the impact of today’s devastating admission from the Administration that, after three years, it still cannot implement Obamacare without strangling businesses in red tape and destroying American jobs. That said, it is still not too late for Congress to do the right thing, and refuse to fund what the Administration has now—finally—admitted is a job-killing train wreck.
LEARN MORE:
The Obamacare Train Wreck Three Years In
Obamacare in Pictures: If you like your health care, can you really keep it?
Read the Morning Bell and more en español every day at Heritage Libertad.
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