What the employer mandate delay means for ObamaCare
The Obama administration is pushing back a key requirement until 2015
On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced that it is pushing back a significant element of the Affordable Care Act — the requirement that businesses with 50 or more employees provide health insurance — to 2015, from its scheduled 2014 start.
Businesses are generally very pleased. And ObamaCare opponents have seized on the announcement as evidence that the legislation is fundamentally flawed.
ObamaCare's employer mandate, like its individual mandate, is really more of a penalty — medium and large companies that don't provide their employees health benefits will have to pay a fine. The Treasury Department says it is delaying enforcing the penalty because it has heard the business community's "concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively." The one-year delay has two goals, says Treasury official Mark J. Mazur:
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Republicans and other ObamaCare critics see other goals. Mostly, political ones. And politically, this is "deviously brilliant," says Douglas Holtz-Eakin at American Action Forum. "Democrats no longer face the immediate specter of running against the fallout from a heavy regulatory imposition on employers" in the 2014 midterms.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) managed to fit both the political argument and the GOP's policy charge in one concise sentence: "Pushing the implementation of the employer mandate until after the 2014 election confirms the law was a historic mistake."
However, many supporters of Obama's landmark health care law, like The Washington Post's Ezra Klein, say good riddance to bad policy. "Delaying ObamaCare's employer mandate is the right thing to do," Klein says. "Frankly, eliminating it — or at least utterly overhauling it — is probably the right thing to do."
It doesn't affect that many businesses: There are maybe 10,000 companies with 50+ employees that don't already provide health coverage, out of 5.7 million. And as structured, it "gives employers a reason to have fewer full-time workers, and fewer low-income workers," Klein notes.
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Josh Barro at Business Insider says this may be a sign that Democrats are "looking for a way to avoid imposing it ever," shifting the cost of health care from employers to taxpayers:
However, in terms of how this delay will affect ObamaCare, it's sort of a nothingburger, says Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic. "The employer mandate is both weaker and less important than most people realize," he says, and the delay will have almost no federal budgetary impact. "Delaying or modifying the employer mandate is exactly the kind of adjustment many experts expected the law would need–and that, in a less polarized environment, would happen through Congress without nearly this much fuss."
But the latest news could certainly have a political impact. "This is Washington, folks, and we're talking about ObamaCare," says Jared Bernstein at The New York Times.
Indeed, the delay comes at a bad time for the Obama administration, say Jennifer Haberkorn and Jason Millman, and Brett Norman at Politico, noting that the White House is "building momentum for its public education campaign and trying to send out signals that everything was on track for enrollment to begin in October."
There is one "silver lining for the White House," though, the Politico teams says:
Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
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