Noah Rothman:
In a fanfare-free announcement on the Treasury Department’s Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy’s blog in February, the administration announced that the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that medium-sized businesses cover their employees’ health coverage or pay fines was delayed… again. The implementation of the employer mandate was previously delayed for businesses of all sizes until 2015, but the administration determined that this was still not enough time to allow for the majority of American firms to comply with the 2010 law. Thatlatest delay pushed off the employer mandate for businesses with between 50 and 99 employees until 2016.
In June, National Journal’s Ron Fournier predicted that the White House would have no choice but to embrace the mandate – it is the “law of the land,” after all – and they should do it sooner rather than later. He noted that the mandate is a critical funding mechanism designed to help subsidize expanded insurance coverage, and that it would require an act of Congress in an election year to repeal it.
“They’ve already delayed the mandate twice,” Fournier wrote. “A third time would further diminish the credibility of the law and of the administration.”
But the political and technical problems the mandate presents for the party in power have long been a greater source of concern for liberals. In July of last year, Vox.com founder Ezra Klein praised the delay of the ACA’s employer mandate and recommended that it be repealed entirely. In April, former White House Press Sec. Robert Gibbs predicted that the mandate would be jettisoned entirely.
It seems that liberal advocates and activists are leaning more in that direction than in Fournier’s. On Monday, a Politico report detailed how liberals are giving up on the employer mandate.
“More and more liberal activists and policy experts who help shape Democratic thinking on health care have concluded that penalizing businesses if they don’t offer health insurance is an unnecessary element of the Affordable Care Act that may do more harm than good,”Politico reported.
Silly duck!
Obama had a few chances to sign ”acts of Congress,” repealing this major funding of his signature achievement.
He refused.
But he couldn’t deal with the 2010 and 2012 blowback that would have happened if he had enforced it.
So, he did his unilateral thing.
Like over twenty times he’s done with portions of ObamaCare.
ObamaCare is sitting on shifting sands.
It has no financial underpinnings.
It will be incredibly more expensive because Obama is scared to charge Americans its real costs before any election.
But Obama also doesn’t want to even tacitly say Republicans were right in not wanting certain parts of O’Care.
This is a real dilemma for Obama.
As opposed to his many false dilemmas he creates via his imaginary boogymen (straw men).
Schadenfreude!