Finally, President Obama has recognized his health-care reform isn’t working out the way he said it would. So this week he delayed implementation of the employer mandate for another year, to Jan. 1, 2015.
That’s an embarrassing retreat on a signature issue. That he attributed it to complaints from employers suggests he’s been getting an earful about the harm it’s doing to jobs and business. Even the man who wrote much of the bill — Sen. Max Baucus — says it could be a “train wreck.”
No doubt, too, the delay reflects complaints from Democrats who don’t want to go into the 2014 elections with this healthcare albatross around their necks.
We don’t blame them. But we’re not sure delay helps them all that much.
Writing in the Weekly Standard, Jim Capretta, a health-care expert with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, notes that in some ways it makes the whole law harder to defend. How, for example, will Democrats explain relieving employers of their mandate to provide insurance while the IRS can tax workers for not meeting their individual mandate to buy insurance?
It also means that House Republicans — who have been slammed by the Beltway press corps for having had nearly 40 votes to repeal ObamaCare — suddenly don’t look so unwise. To follow on Nancy Pelosi’s famous crack about having to pass the bill to find out what’s in it, it’s looking more and more as though the GOP knows more about what’s really in ObamaCare than the president.
The White House says the delay is just a matter of a few last-minute fixes. But the problems we’re seeing suggests something opponents have been arguing all along: The whole thing’s just plain unworkable.