The Obamacare mess
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/t ... 93732.html
And yes, it's already a mess, and it hasn't even been rolled out.
The administration can call it whatever it wants, but there is no hiding the embarrassment of a climbdown on a high-profile feature of President Barack Obama’s signature initiative — although the administration seemed determined to do all it could to hide it. If Bloomberg hadn’t broken the news on Tuesday, the administration was apparently planning to announce it on July 3 — only because the day before Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve were too far off.
The reason for the delay, we’re told, is incompetence. The administration’s story is that it simply couldn’t find a way to implement the insurance reporting requirements on employers within the time frame set out in the law. In this telling, the mandate was merely collateral damage — it had to be put off, along with the accompanying $2,000-per-employee fine on firms with more than 50 employees who don’t offer health coverage.
This just happens to be the mandate that is causing howls of pain from businesses and creating perverse incentives for them to limit their hiring or to hire part- rather than full-time employees. And it just happens that 2015 — the new target year for implementation — is after a midterm election year rather during one. It must all be a lucky break. …
Obamacare was sold on two flagrantly false promises: that you could keep the insurance you have and that prices for insurance would drop. But employers will dump significant numbers of employees onto the exchanges to save on their own health-care costs. And the latest indication of the law’s price shock came via The Wall Street Journal this week, which reported, “healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage.”
Yes, Obama LIED to the very People he claims to champion -- "the little guy."
This misspeaking -- which is what the WH will call it -- demonstrates the underlying incompetence of the ObamaCare project, from start to finish. It promises something that it not only couldn’t deliver, but made all but impossible from its very existence.
In addition, a huge top-down bureaucracy is created that makes everything more costly for everyone -- and it's not just consumers. Government, providers, insurers and employers will ALL PAY MORE. So now the mandate has been delayed until 2015 -- after the midterm elections so that Dems don't lose even more seats over their unanimous support for this LIE.
Obama now faces policy debates on immigration in the House and the budget and debt ceiling in both the House and Senate. By delaying all of the implementation, Obama is violating the letter of the law. He can do that? Don't think so. Obama is once again arbitrarily ignoring statutory law and defying Congress in this matter. I doubt that the Congress will be willing to listen to anything Obama says on immigration or the debt ceiling if he has this view that he can do anything he wishes. Good faith agreement with Obama? No way. He's proven that.
