President Obama today once again delayed the implementation of a key provision of Obamacare -- the requirement that employers with 50 or more employees provide them health insurance. You'll recall that he had previously delayed the same provision from the statutory start date of January 1, 2014 to January 1, 2015. Now employers with under 100 employees will not have to meet the requirement until January 1, 2016, and employers with 100+ employees will only have to insure 70% of their employees to be in compliance. The obvious reasoning is that enforcing the requirement will cause employers to cut jobs and/or not create new jobs in order to avoid the requirement.
An obvious response would be... huh? The incoherence of the move is patent... if employers will cut jobs to stay under the 50 employee threshold, they'll also cut jobs to stay under the 100 employee threshold. And how exactly is a larger company to determine which of its employees will fall into the lucky 70% who have health insurance and which do not? That sounds like a recipe for lawsuits to me.
Another obvious response is to note the hypocrisy. For years, and even before the legislation was passed, Republicans said Obamacare would be a job killer. Now Obama is essentially conceding the point... sure, it will kill jobs, but we are going to put off its job-killing effects until after the 2014 mid-terms. After that, the recession that ensues will be Hillary Clinton's problem or, better still, a Republican President's.
Still another obvious response is to note the lawlessness. By what authority does Obama use executive rule-making, not to implement a law, but to change its effective date for preferred citizen groups (employers) but not for other citizens (individuals who purchase insurance themselves)? The Constitution tasks him with taking care to see that the laws are enforced. When a President can essentially unilaterally decide which laws to enforce and which not to enforce, we no longer live in a Constitutional democracy.
But to me the thing that sticks out is this: Remember what the premise of Obamacare was? People were uninsured, and the lack of insurance meant that they didn't get necessary health care, and the lack of that necessary health care meant that people died. Democrats sold the program on humanitarian grounds, and lambasted Republicans who opposed it as people who didn't "care," who were content to see people die. Using their own logic, how many people will die in 2014 and 2015 waiting for the health insurance that Obama promised them?
If even one child dies who could be saved.... well, you know the liberal mantra.
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