Employer mandate of Affordable Care Act suspended until 2015

[Ben Huh]

[fstarcstar]

Just goes to show how horrible the legislation is. I wonder if they can push it back another couple of years after 2015.

[PoS]

With Obamacare being such a f**k Im surprised there isnt a bigger movement to repeal it.

[The Dude]

I want to clairfy some things.

1. roughly 10k out of 5.6 million employers are subject to the mandate. Everyone else either doesn't have 50 employees or already offer insurance. For all the talk about the employer mandate, it's only relevant for a very small subset of the labor force. The employer mandate has no effect on people with employer insurance.

2. Of all the explanations, having the individual mandate be a "test run" makes no sense because they work so differently.

3. The official explanation is that employers have too many questions about complying and the WH wants to give them more time. This includes from employers who shouldn't be concerned.

4. The unofficial explanation, and one that can't be discounted, is that the WH wanted to push this back til after the 2014 midterms for political reasons and avoid the GOP from running false accusations related to it since it would be in effect. I do think this plays a big part into it.

5. The other truth is, the employer mandate isn't good policy as constructed. I think the WH has figured that out (this wasn't an Obama aspect of the law BTW, it originated from the House and was changed at the insistence of businesses). The problem here is that the GOP won't pass any legislation to fix it. They will only pass legislation that completely repeals Obamacare completely. What they should be doing is fixing the things we know don't work or things that come up in the future that won't work, but instead of trying to make things better for normal folks they want to make it as hard as possible to piss people off and be upset about Obamacare. It's a futile effort, of course, but it's the path they've chosen and won't compromise. So the WH delayed it probably hoping that by 2014 they can get control and fix it (after delaying it again).


Yes, Fstar, they can delay it indefinitely I'd assume. If they can do it one year unilaterally, why not forever? Hopefully at some point in the future Congress either scraps it or rewrites is back to the original payroll mandate

[Ben Huh]

IMO pushing back the entire implementation until 2015 is a political win for Democrats, because if there are any initial failures once it goes into effect then instead of early 2014, those failures will occur after the 2014 midterms and not before.

[The Dharma Bum]

Theres your reason why

[Professor]

I'm not sure that I understand how they can legally do this. The law specifically says that employers shall provide insurance by January 1, 2014, or pay a penalty. How does the executive branch get to unilaterally change that to 2015?

[Indy]

Obamacare needs to be scrapped and re-done.

Problem is, the GOP will never agree to create a healthcare package because they're out of their f***ing tree. Because yew doon want none of that socialism here in God's fav-ritt country.

So we're back to square one.

[Professor]

Scrap government-run healthcare, and instead install government-regulated healthcare.

Allow private companies to supply healthcare, under government regulations and oversight. For instance, mandating that insurance companies spend 80% of all premiums on direct care is a good thing.

It's funny how everyone says that private healthcare doesn't work. How can anyone say that, when it's never been tried? Ever since healthcare became a true industry (when science took over from snake-oil salesmen and barbers were no longer allowed to perform medical procedures), we've have government-run programs that crowded out competition.

[Indy]