Things aren’t exactly looking up for President Obama these days. The rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s central feature, the exchanges where people without employer-provided health insurance are meant to purchase plans, has been disastrous, marked by IT problems and astonishingly low enrollment numbers. The President’s promise that “If you like your plan, you can keep it” has been shown to be knowingly false. The number of people losing coverage is so far rapidly outpacing the number of people gaining coverage. And the administration’s haphazard fixes may only be worsening the situation, promising even deeper political trouble down the road.
First the administration delayed the employer mandate, which, now starting in 2015, will force employers with more than fifty quasi-full-time employees to provide health insurance or pay a new tax. The administration’s decision to delay the mandate, welcome as it may have been to businesses that gained an additional year to deal with the new regulations and obligations they will face, will almost surely lead to political damage at a very unhelpful time. Right before the 2014 midterm elections, about half of all employer plans would have to be canceled or replaced. This would show an immense number of Americans, more than ten times as many as those who are now receiving individual-market cancellation notices, that the administration’s promises that you can keep your doctor were false, and it will show them this in a direct, personal manner. It seems unlikely that congressional Democrats would be willing to deal with the political fallout from such unpleasant news right before facing reelection.
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