Marathon Pundit: 4th of July news dump: ObamaCare employer mandate postponed a year

Tuesday, July 02, 2013

4th of July news dump: ObamaCare employer mandate postponed a year

Happy Newsdump Day!

Could ObamaCare collapse under its own weight?

Conveniently--for the White House--the employee mandate postponement announcement comes just before the July 4 holiday--as many Americans leave town and aren't paying attention to current events.

From the Chicago Tribune:

The Obama administration delayed a key provision of the president's healthcare reform law by a year, saying today it will not require employers to provide health insurance for their workers until 2015.

The delay, which could raise new questions about whether Obamacare will be implemented on time, comes in response to widespread complaints from businesses and their lobbyists about reporting requirements for employers with 50 or more full-time workers.

Companies would have had to pay the Internal Revenue Service $2,000 for each full-time employee who did not get health coverage, beginning Jan. 1, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was scheduled to come into full effect.

"We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively," Mark J. Mazur, assistant secretary for tax policy, wrote in a post that was published on the department's website late Tuesday.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued the following statement about the postponement:

ObamaCare costs too much and it isn't working the way the administration promised. And while the White House seems to slowly be admitting what Americans already know, and what I hear consistently in my travels around Kentucky regarding the regulatory burden on employers, the fact remains that ObamaCare needs to be repealed and replaced with common-sense reforms that actually lower costs for Americans.

US Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) also commented on this news.

This evening's news dump is the White House finally acknowledging what everyone else already knew: the president's health care reform was ill-conceived and is thus unworkable in the real world. But admitting the employer mandate isn't ready for prime time raises more questions than answers.

Will delaying the employer mandate for one year without penalties result in more Americans getting dumped into state-run exchanges? Yet the health care exchanges are facing serious implementation hurdles on their own. Recently, the Government Accountability Office warned that state exchanges would not be ready for enrollees by the October 1st deadline. Delaying the employer mandate only creates more confusion for individual Americans and businesses who are left wondering where to turn for their health insurance.

The fact remains that ObamaCare is such a complex web that pulling a single string here causes something to unravel over there. The American people deserve better than this train wreck of a law. It's time to scrap ObamaCare and replace it with patient-centered reforms that lower costs and increase the quality of care.

Another Illinois Republican member of Congress, Adam Kinzinger, released this statement:

Today's announcement only underscores what Republicans have been saying since day one; Obamacare is bad for business and bad for Americans," said Kinzinger. "This law will not lower healthcare costs nor will it improve medical care, and the worst is still yet to come.