Another Obamacare delay has taken effect, although you may not have heard.
The administration has quietly announced that it was delaying through
October 2016 the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate for millions
of Americans who have lost their healthcare coverage.
The latest change was buried in an announcement that Americans would be
able to keep health plans that do not meet Obamacare standards for
another two years, Fox News reports.
Political consultant Dick Morris says the effect of this announcement
with all the other Obamacare delays means that the act has now
effectively been repealed.
"When you take the employer mandate that's been postponed, the
small-business mandate that's been postponed, and the individual mandate
that now has been given all kinds of escape clauses," he said, "you're
essentially saying the boss doesn't have to provide it and you don't
have to buy it. So, what's left?" he said on Newsmax TV's America's
Forum.
"You don't have to buy insurance because there are all these escapes and
your boss doesn't have to buy insurance if he is a small, medium or
large business," he said. "This is to say any employer. And essentially
now, all of it is postponed or overridden. So, it's really a [de facto]
repeal."
Bradley Blakeman, former presidential assistant under George W. Bush,
told Newsmax that Obama was attempting to "rig" November's congressional
elections with the move.
"He’s unilaterally amending a law in order to save Democrats in the
fall," said Blakeman. "You expect John Gotti to operate this way, not
the president of the United States. It’s thuggery.
"He’s afraid, obviously he can’t go to Congress and get the law amended,
and he has to save as many seats as he can, so he unilaterally amends
the law. And he does so in a way that’s secretive. And he doesn’t make
an announcement from the East room. He gets out his pen, and he does it
in the dark of night.”
The seven-page
technical bulletin, published
with the announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services,
contains a paragraph and footnote that refer to yet another rule in
another bulletin that grants a "hardship exemption" to those whose
policies were canceled, through October 2016.
News of the latest change was first reported Wednesday in an editorial in
The Wall Street Journal. The bulletin that led to the editorial was published March 5.
In other words, the quietly announced change will not, until October
2016, penalize any Americans who lost their health insurance when the
Obamacare individual mandate took effect last year but still have not
gotten new coverage.
Since the last delay of the individual mandate in December, Americans
have been told that they had to purchase insurance by March 31 to avoid
being fined by the Internal Revenue Service.
Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee attacked the
latest Obamacare delay, charging on Wednesday that the White House is
working to "bury its failures when nobody is watching."
"With less than three weeks remaining before the end of the healthcare
law's first open enrollment period, the Obama administration continues
to quietly abandon many of the law's core elements," the
legislators said in a blog post on the committee's website.
"Throughout the law’s troubled implementation, the administration made
unilateral change after unilateral change as it attempted to hide some
of the law’s most harmful and controversial effects," the post said.
"Many of these announcements have come late on Friday afternoon or
before holidays, often will little fanfare."
But an HHS official told Fox that "we want consumers to have as many
options as possible" and that the "transitional policy" will allow them
to keep the coverage they have "if they would like to do so."
Later the agency said, “This is a common-sense clarification of the law
that we made clear last December. For the limited number of consumers
whose plans have been cancelled and are seeking coverage, this is one
more option."
But this latest delay may not be so simple, Fox reports.
State insurance commissioners and insurance companies must decide
whether to offer plans that have already been canceled — and many have
objected to the latest extension.
Also, many Americans have since been forced to find new policies, often
facing higher premiums and deductibles or reduced coverage.
"There's no question we got off to a really bad start, and that was on
us," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on Wednesday, according
to Fox. "And a lot of effort was put into making sure that the website
and the problems with it were fixed.
"Once that happened, we've seen the American people's interest in the
product not waver at all, despite all of the obstacles to obtaining it
that were put in front of them, and, you know, we've seen a consistent
growth in enrollments."
About 4.2 million people have signed up through the Obamacare exchanges,
Carney said, a number that continues to lag behind projections.
Just last month, HHS Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius retreated on comments that she had made in 2013 that the administration had a 7 million enrollment target for Obamacare.
