Obamacare: Is the program already in trouble?

The White House announced a one-year delay in the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate.

We always knew the Affordable Care Act would be a disaster, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, but with six months before most of it even takes effect, President Obama’s signature accomplishment is already becoming “a fiasco for the ages.” In a clear attempt to bury bad news, the White House waited until the eve of the July 4th holiday to announce a one-year delay in the ACA’s “employer mandate”—requiring businesses with more than 50 full-time employees to provide workers with health insurance. The White House and its defenders are downplaying the significance of this tactical retreat, said Yuval Levin in NationalReview.com. But given the political embarrassment it inevitably caused, it’s a sign that Obamacare is in serious trouble. For three years, the administration has smugly denied Republican criticism that the giant health-care bureaucracy at the heart of Obamacare is unworkable. Now that implementation draws near, “the wheels are coming off the bus,” and even the administration has been forced to admit it.

Don’t be fooled by “the Obamacare Train Wreck Doomsaying chorus,” said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com.The employer mandate is not a central aspect of the new system, and the administration delayed it until 2015 only to mollify companies who complained that proving their compliance was too burdensome. The vast majority of employers already do offer health insurance, so this delay means little, and will affect only about 1 percent of the U.S. workforce. “Introducing a program this big was always going to be bumpy,” said USA Today. When the Bush administration expanded Medicare to include prescription drug coverage, the program got off to a very rough start and had to be fixed. Obamacare’s central reform remains on track for 2014—providing affordable health insurance through exchanges to the 50 million uninsured Americans. Those rooting for an Obamacare collapse would sentence these Americans to a life without regular health care.

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