Of course: Obama delays employer mandate another year

I suppose you could regard this as good news if you don't like the law that goes officially by the name the Affordable Care Act. It is, for all intents and purposes, not in effect, because the president of the United States simply exempts or delays whichever parts prove problematic.

Unfortunately, the president of the United States is Barack Obama, who doesn't always exercise the best judgment with respect to which parts will actually be enforced and which parts will be ignored/delayed/arbitrarily changed. There is that whole separation of powers thing too, but Obama can scarcely be inconvenienced with constitutional niceties when he's got a country to transform. So yeah, he's done it again. Having already delayed the employer mandate until 2015, Obama has now delayed it again for most employers until 2016. Who knows if it will ever go into effect? Not that it would be a good thing if it did, but it would be far better if Congress were to simply remove the annual uncertainty and repeal it - along with the rest of ObamaCare - altogether. But that's not what you get when Barack Obama is president. Having been handed a law that theoretically does all kinds of things to the health care and employer markets, he simply exercises the power to choose the ones he actually wants to do and disregard the rest. Must be nice. The Wall Street Journal reports:

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Under the new Treasury rule, firms with 50 to 99 full-time workers are free from the mandate until 2016. And firms with 100 or more workers now also only need cover 70% of full-time workers in 2015 and 95% in 2016 and after, not the 100% specified in the law. The new rule also relaxes the mandate for certain occupations and industries that were at particular risk for disruption, like volunteer firefighters, teachers, adjunct faculty members and seasonal employees. Oh, and the Treasury also notes that, "As these limited transition rules take effect, we will consider whether it is necessary to further extend any of them beyond 2015." So the law may be suspended indefinitely if the White House feels like it. By now ObamaCare's proliferating delays, exemptions and administrative retrofits are too numerous to count, most of them of dubious legality. The text of the Affordable Care Act specifically says when the mandate must take effect..."after December 31, 2013"...and does not give the White House the authority to change the terms.

There are two ways to read this, and my guess is that they're both correct. The policy view is that Obama recognizes how weak job creation is, and just as employers told him last year the mandate would deflate what little strength there was then, things have gotten no better and the same is true today. He knows that as bad as things are right now, they're going to get far worse if he fires that bullet into the torso of the job market, so he simply can't do it. Then there's the political view, and this one is easy. Remember what a political disaster it was for Democrats in the fall when folks on the individual market started getting their cancellation letters? Once the employer mandate kicks in, that whole thing repeats itself - this time with people who get insurance through their employers getting the ziggy. And under the current schedule, that would have commenced in October 2014 - just before the mid-term elections. You think 2010 was a Red Wave election? Just imagine what would have happened if we'd had an election a few weeks after that. It's politically shameless, and it's a totally unconstitutional power grab, but Obama can't afford to care at this point. Chances are he won't let the mandate go into effect next year either, or ever, because the same problems will always present themselves. What we have here is a law that is complicated enough as written, but essentially means nothing anyway because the president has no compunction about simply altering it on the fly - and no one seems to know a way to stop him. He is making it up as he goes along, and until ObamaCare is repealed in full, that is what he will continue to do.