The latest mutation of the Affordable Care Act, informally announced to insurance executives during an industry conference this week, will apparently push insurance plan mandates back by at least a year… and maybe longer. There is little pretense that this is anything but a purely political act, and that’s why the new delay might last longer, because Democrats are evidently worried that ObamaCare insurance cancellations could produce enough public backlash to sink both their 2014 congressional candidates and 2016 presidential ticket.
Two things about this new unsettling of The Settled Law of the Land are particularly amusing. First, it’s going to make a mockery of Obama’s spin from the past few months. When he found himself backed into a corner on the obvious falsehood of his infamous like-your-plan, keep-your-plan promise, his last-ditch spin was to go on offense and announce we should be happy his health-care scheme was killing our insurance plans, because they sucked anyway. Obama’s loyal followers dutifully spilled gallons of ink and megabytes of pixels repeating this Party line.
And of course, lately they’ve been denying that insurance cancellation horror stories exist at all, dispatching one of their least appealing spokesmen, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to dismiss cancer patients as a pack of filthy liars. I guess that didn’t work, huh? Bad apple insurance plans are back in vogue, probably until after Hillary Clinton takes her shot at the White House. If most of the unhappy ObamaCare victims are liars, why rewrite the Settled Law of the Land again to keep their insurance plans alive for years to come?
The other funny thing about the new ObamaCare delay is the way it clearly shows President Obama and his apparatchiks don’t understand the industry they’re micro-regulating. They thought they were going to squeak past the midterms with an informal one-year moratorium that would have delayed the next huge wave of insurance cancellations until December, but they forgot how insurance companies are required to send out cancellation notices 90 days in advance. That means millions of Big Lie victims were going to get their cancellation notices in October… right before the midterms. In fact, the notices would hit at just about the worst possible time, giving voters a month to digest the bad news and turn their wrath against shaky Democrat congressional candidates.
So we’ll get another year’s delay in the mandates that were wiping out good old plans and forcing Americans to replace them with expensive, high-deductible ObamaCare plans packed full of obligatory goodies such as maternal coverage for men… and maybe a couple more years after that. The employer mandates have already been partially delayed again. Pressure is mounting to delay the individual mandate – no doubt nervous Democrats are telling the Administration they have a really hard time defending the imposition of personal mandates on the Little Guy while Obama’s handing out waivers to business interests. Perhaps this is all a cunning strategy to defuse the repeal movement by leaving them with only a few scraps of badly-written law to repeal.
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