The Employer Mandate News | National Review Online - 0 views
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a delay won’t fix the real problem or unwind the consequences already seen: a pile-up in lost hours worked for modest-wage earners.
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A delay to 2015 is not long at all, since many employers acted to curb hours in the spring of 2013, well before the original 2014 start date. Thus, the delay is unlikely to provide comfort to workers already impacted — or to Democrats ahead of the 2014 mid-terms.
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Obama needed the mandate to get Obamacare passed because it would reduce participation in the exchanges and therefore the law’s overall costs. One of his key selling points for the law was that it would cut the deficit. Now that the law has passed, his administration is freer to pursue changes that will raise Obamacare’s cost to taxpayers but improve its effects on the economy.Delaying the employer mandate, perhaps indefinitely, is one way to do that.
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the delay might accelerate the unraveling of employer-sponsored health coverage:If you like Obamacare, and you want it to work, you don’t need the employer mandate. Democrats put the employer mandate in Obamacare because the President was worried that, without a mandate, employers would dump coverage, violating his oft-repeated promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep it.
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(the “American Job Protection Act”) is that one can very easily imagine it being taken up by left-wing Democrats as well as right-wing Republicans, albeit for different reasons.
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delaying the employer mandate could lead, ultimately, to its repeal, which would do much to transition our insurance market from an employer-sponsored one to an individually-purchased one.
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If the employer mandate were to ultimately be repealed, or never implemented, today’s news may turn out to be one of the most significant developments in health care policy in recent memory.
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Even if the Obama administration’s delay lasts for only one year, that delay will give firms time to restructure their businesses to avoid offering costly coverage, leading to an expansion of the individual insurance market and a shrinkage of the employer-sponsored market.
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If we transition from employer-provided coverage to tightly-regulated state-based insurance markets, it is possible that the insurance business will become even more rigid than it already is — this is why I’ve called for a national exchange as a kind of escape hatch. And of course if the private insurance market becomes more dysfunctional, a single-payer, Medicare-for-all alternative will become more politically attractive.