Abandoning the Obamacare employer mandate
Now Democrats may be poised to abandon the Obamacare employer mandate, according to this article. They just won’t do it before the election of 2014:
More and more liberal activists and policy experts who help shape Democratic thinking on health care have concluded that penalizing businesses if they don’t offer health insurance is an unnecessary element of the Affordable Care Act that may do more harm than good. Among them are experts at the Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund and prominent academics like legal scholar Tim Jost…
Leading Democrats in Congress aren’t bolting from the employer mandate, at least not before the November election. But the White House has delayed it twice in the past year, dubbed it “not critical” and said it will be phased in more slowly when its begins next year.
The rule that businesses with more than 50 full-time workers offer them affordable health insurance has been a political headache from the start. The nonstop stream of headlines, however anecdotal, about businesses cutting jobs or shortening workweeks to skirt the coverage rules has constantly inflamed opposition to Obamacare.
Chris Jennings, a longtime health policy hand who helped the White House during the final implementation push, says the employer mandate has become a “political irritant” …
Estimates of the mandate’s worth to Obamacare financing range from $46 billion to more than $100 billion over a decade. That helps pay for coverage expansion. Getting a bipartisan deal to scrap the policy is one hurdle; an agreement on how to make up the money could be even harder.
Everything in the article could be summarized this way: Republicans were right all along about the employer mandate and its effects, and Democrats now realize that, too. But somehow in about 1500 words it can’t quite get that thought together and express it. It also seems pretty likely (although not mentioned either) that without the mandate, the CBO probably wouldn’t have scored the bill as fiscally okay and it might not have passed. But that’s water over the dam, right?
But the employee mandate is by no means the only part of Obamacare’s financial underpinnings that’s falling to pieces. This article contends that the whole thing is rotten through and through in terms of the money that was supposed to support it. That should be no surprise to anyone, either.
What a vile state of affairs.
The impact predicted by just about everyone outside the fevered White House…
Is now showing up in macro employment statistics.
Note the collapse in full time employment and the towering expansion of part time employment.
Everything is echoing the Hawaiian experience of the 1970s, something that Barry experienced as a teenager — in a highly politicized household.
Also left out of the article is the bad optics of abandoning the employer mandate while retaining the individual one. As a practical matter, I can see the logic, but let’s be serious, almost no voter is going to see the logic on either side of the divide.
“What a vile state of affairs.”
Yes and it’s all Bush’s fault!”
The racist Republicans are preventing ObamaCare from working properly.
Affordable Health Care is a human right.
Obama is being prevented from proper implementation of the ACA by the GOP’s appeasement of the Tea Party.
The evil insurance companies are purposely sabotaging the implementation of the ACA.
Businesses that cut worker hours and fire employees are protecting their exorbitant profits.
Off the top of my head, that’s all I can think of, did I miss any of the left’s ‘talking points’?
http://www.alchemyinstitute.com/false-memory.html
A source material, or rumor level, about something I’ve mentioned before.
People can’t or don’t want to escape from the LEftist cult for a number of reasons.
It’s easier to counter attack the Left’s weaknesses once you educate yourself on those reasons.
As I recall, the ACA was going to lower healthcare costs (It hasn’t) and insure all the uninsured (It hasn’t, not by a long shot). In the process, if you liked your health insurance, you would be able to keep your insurance (Nope!), and if you liked your doctor, you could keep your doctor. Period! (Not exactly!)
Those were the selling points. The ACA was sold to the public based on soaring hope. Obama and the people who wrote the law hoped they could deliver what they claimed. It has long been apparent that they did not know what they were talking about. This is a lemon of a law. Bad law should be repealed.
There are two classes of people in life, folks who view human existence as strictly binary and those who do not.
The folks who do not, the non-Left, are reluctant (absurdly and reality-defyingly so) to criticize the Left for being what it is, binary; that would be a binary position.
The Left, the binary people, the ever-flexible Manicheans, the fluid adopters of the daily black and white position, propagandize the non-Left for being non-diverse, binary. It doesn’t make any difference whether any given Leftist believes it or not, for example, that any given non-Leftist is a racist. They are just a racist.
The position of the Left reduces to a childish temper tantrum (see the non-Left binary analysis there?). There are no issues, there are no problems to be solved, there is no governance which requires balancing of factors.
Cost/benefit analysis is crassly materialist.
Unintended consequences are trivial and will be swept away by the force of correct intentions.
Truth, accuracy, honesty, open-mindedness, scorn for even the notion of objectivity, are off the table, everything is malleable in the Left binary world. Epistemic closure is the sign of superiority, as long as there is no acknowledgement of the weapon.
Personal modesty, humility, so requisite for the serenity of mankind, is categorically absent from the Left. How’s that for a binary statement?
So much depends on the presence of genius, those few humans who for some unknown reason are present every where and at all times. Not many of them make a big difference, but some do.
Roger Simon of PJ media wrote a while back that folks in the various commentaries of various non-Left sites were doing a disservice by expressing fatalism. He was right, no question. But one of the complications of life is not speaking reality for sake of not making things worse, when not speaking reality might be the worst thing to do. It is a question of personal modesty, and treating other people with respect, hoping they can sort things out, even if the speaker (hoping the listener understands) understands there is a risk in saying a particular thing.
The genius we don’t have and need is Rabelais. Or we need a consortium of geniuses like Rabelais. American culture is a mass of soggy newspapers, both semi-literally metaphorically and metaphorically.
We are suffocating. We are being asphyxiated by the creatively binary minds of millions of people who occupy the heights of near-absolute stifledom.
The utter human sage, the intellectual who disdained pretense, the world-historical man, Ronald Reagan, was a gift to us. He tried to sustain the human goodness of unique America and unique Founders.
We need another gift now. It will not be a Ronald Reagan. Politics slipped away some years ago. The millions of the occupying army will not be removed by an election, something they know, which is why they openly speak like Hitlers, Stalins, Castros, Maos, Pol Pots, Neros.
There is yet a moment left where the laughter can be invoked by a genius, or a group of geniuses. It would at least have to be on a Seinfeld level. Whatever the medium, it would need to be so brilliant as to break through the small temporary duration we might still have to break through. That opportunity is being successfully and rapidly closed by the binary, epistemic closure thinkers, who are close to a tsunami, as they recognize.
The absurdity, the hilarity, the ridiculousness, the Barny Fife essence of the Left, the opportunity for continuous joyful HUMAN laughter at their expense, has no role in our American society now, if it ever will. Time will tell.
I hope there is a lurking genius on our side. Eyes atm can only be opened by laughter.
J.J., 8:02 pm — “The ACA was sold to the public based on soaring hope. Obama and the people who wrote the law hoped they could deliver what they claimed. It has long been apparent that they did not know what they were talking about.”
They did not have to know what they were talking about. Merely saying it made it so. It was only those eeeevil righties [perhaps we should be saying, non-lefties] whose recalcitrance, whether due to greed, ideology, racism [gotta get that in there, whether or not it fits], or mere inertia, who were holding back Progress with a capital P.
It is sobering to imagine what (if anything) really goes on in the minds of these people [I specified *minds*, not emotions or glands]. A typical family’s premiums would go down by $2500 annually, but/and everyone was going to be covered, regardless of preexisting conditions. I.E., *nothing* was resident in the minds of these people, save mendacity: say and do whatever it takes to impose Progressive utopia.
Worry about reality later.
Okay. Rant over. Yeeeesh.
That entire article is a rationalization.
The real reason Dems are talking about doing away with the employer mandate is pure politics:
8 million people lost their insurance under the individual mandate, and it caused a shitstorm. If implemented, the employer mandate would make 80 million people lose their coverage.
There would be nobody in the U.S. that didn’t either lose their coverage, or know someone else that did.
And since the costs have been so far beyond the predictions, the system would collapse within a year.
The Dems would be blamed for generations for a blunder of this magnitude.
*That’s* why they want to get rid of it. *That’s* why Obama has kept pushing back its implementation.
MJR: “They did not have to know what they were talking about. Merely saying it made it so.”
Yes, intent is so very important. Results, not so much.
This is an interesting historical curiosity: a short film made by the US Government in 1962 called “RED NIGHTMARE.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgR4apcz_Ew
“Jerry Donovan is a small town American who takes his civil liberties for granted. One night, Jerry dreams that his community has been taken over by communists. His friends and family quickly turn against him leading to his arrest and conviction for “subversive” activities.”
Intro by Jack Webb, of “Dragnet” fame.
MJR, you have to pass the bill to know what’s in the bill.
That’s knowing what they were doing all right.
404Care is the Viagra Law that keeps on screwing (us), and for much longer than 4 hours.
——
The nuns in my grade school, I guess around 6th grade (’66), showed us that film short. It really is a powerful movie that had a tremendous impact on me and my political beliefs (I still hate commies!) and should be shown in schools today. But since civics went by the boards, I have no expectation that any school/teacher will show it, much less understand or be able to instruct on its message.
When th employer mandate is formally abandoned, can we expect more employers to dump their employees onto the ACA exchanges? If so, this is a step in the direction of universal government brokered health “insurance.” That may be a feature rather than a bug.
J.J.: “Yes, intent is so very important. Results, not so much.”
This has become typical of almost all Progressive left positions and ideology. They wrap an impossibly lofty stated goal inside of an astonishingly bad plan, one which usually looms as extremely costly. If you argue against the bad plan, the left trumpets from the rooftops that you are against the lofty stated goal. If you point out the costs on balance with the zero likelihood of success of the plan, you are selfish and greedy. Then, when the bad plan inevitably fails, the left then blames its political enemies for the failure.
Because the left owns the media and the schools and the right is consistently unable to respond to this strategy, we even lose ground with the debacles of the left.
Rinse, repeat.
If it’s not extremely costly, how are they going to skim off the top and pay for Chelsea’s education? They’re poor.
The leaders at the top don’t have a counter to the Left, because they either believe in money or believe in the Left’s death god. Thus without sufficient hate of the Leftist alliance, there’s no way a person can come up with the proper defenses or counter attacks.
The Left’s mission is based upon faith. Kickbacks is just their predestined bonus, they think.
OK, so we drop many of the revenue-producing aspects of Obamacare. Now what? It’s costing about 95 billion a year, or will by 2015. Do we raise taxes or cut services? A wonderful quandary for the left, and we know what they’ll say. There’s Paul Ryan shoving grandma off the cliff right now! – vote Democrat. I sometimes wonder whether this was planned – the directest path to single-payer. Sheesh.