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Obamacare Employer Mandate Delayed Until After Congressional Elections
theodp writes "If you hoped your employer would finally provide health insurance in 2014, take two aspirin and call your doctor in the morning — the morning of January 1st, 2015. The Obama administration will delay a crucial provision of its signature health-care law until 2015, giving businesses an extra year to comply with a requirement that they provide their workers with insurance. The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, after the congressional elections, the administration said Tuesday. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don't offer affordable insurance."
More regulatory uncertainty! Yay!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
And political expediency wins again
The question to ask is why would they want to delay implementation until after mid terms?
How many employers will just pay the fine. 3k per year per employee is less than a heathcare plan
Conveniently after the mid-term elections, where frustration with this trainwreck might reflect badly on those in power... One Turkish professor said "He talks like the president of the ACLU, and governs like Dick Cheney."
Is this delay specifically authorized by the law, or is the Obama administration simply going to fail to uphold a law they pushed to get passed?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Yea, we'll get used to having beurecrats make decisions regarding our famililies heathcare. I mean, having the IRS target the businesses of political opponents is nothing compared to denying Grandma her hip replacement because you voted for the wrong candidate.
So at this point companies DON'T have to provide you insurance, but you MUST carry insurance. So all those people who would have been covered if the business deadline wasn't pushed back will be forced to buy their own insurance on the individual market. Either that or pay the "tax." This is a recipe for real disaster.
It has been pretty well established that your smoking neighbor has lower lifetime healthcare costs than someone who is healthy. They tend not to live long enough to get the really expensive things to treat.
While there is probably a political angle to the decision, the reason for the delay is more prosaic:
Under the new law, companies with more than 50 employees must provide their workers with health insurance.* Those companies that do not comply are levied a per-employee tax penalty. Employees that do not receive coverage through their employer can purchase insurance on the open market, and low- and middle-income workers can avail themselves to government subsidies to purchase coverage. In other words, the government is attempting, through the tax code, to recoup the employee's health care subsidy from the employer.
In order to carry out the employer mandate, the Treasury Department needs to know which companies are opting out and also which employees are subsequently utilizing government subsidies for healthcare. This is a technical challenge that the IRS (the Tax Man) has determined they won't have ready in time for the Jan 1, 2014 deadline. Businesses, too, have complained that their duty and mechanism for reporting who they are covering with insurance is difficult and onerous. So the decision has been made to push back the deadline.
Because the whole mechanism is linked to taxes, it is difficult to push the deadline back by, say, six months, because it would be tough to figure out how to pro-rate both the subsidy and the penalty. Most health insurance contracts (employer-provided or otherwise) run from Jan 1 to Dec 31, anyway. So, they pushed the effective date back to the next tax / health insurance / calendar year.
Yes, the new deadline occurs after the 2014 elections. But considering there are national elections every two years in the United States, pushing any deadline back by one year yields a 50/50 chance of passing over an election year. Would pushing it back just six months be any better, how about two years?
* For those, both outside and inside the U.S., who are wondering why health insurance is a benefit attached to a person's job, rather than a social benefit from the government (like in most other countries) or something each person seeks on the open market (like automobile insurance), the answer is: "it's complicated." It isn't the result of any particular plan, that's for damn sure; but rather the long meandering course of history. Those who are curious should read Paul Starr's book The Social Transformation of American Medicine . The Affordable Care Act follows the path of having health insurance as a workplace benefit mostly because that is how most people in the U.S. already get it.
The difference is that in some areas decisions that were made by insurance companies are now made by publicly accountable government employees.
Which would be interesting if the "publicly accountable" part were even remotely true. Look at the political actions of managers and supervisors in the IRS, and the utter stonewalling by that agency and un-shocking lack of curiosity by their boss who heads the executive branch, the president, as to who to hold accountable for exactly the sort of capricious behavior that you're suggesting won't happen. The IRS is hiring tens of thousands of brand new, un-accountable, essentially un-fireable new employees explicitly to have them make judgement calls about whether individual people have been sufficiently in compliance with a gigantic, byzantine new law that nobody understands. They will decide whether those individuals ultimately may end up having wages garnished, businesses ruined, homes seized, or spend time in prison if they aren't doing it exactly right. That you see such new power and enforcement in the hands of the IRS as an improvement is unfortunate.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They don't have to pay the fine, or provide insurance. They just make their employees part timers.
I've seen some anecdotal evidence of this (from waitstaff at a couple different restaurants, security guards at my parking deck, blog posts). Unskilled labor positions (i.e. the people that were targeted to receive this benefit) are just having their hours cut to 30 hours/week because part time employees are not subject to the insurance requirement. With current employment trends, it's easy to hire some extra part timers to fill the gap. It's a non-issue for skilled laborers, because most already receive employer provided insurance.
The real problem here is this law was intended to require a benefit (i.e. minimum compensation) for people who do not generally receive it already. So now, not only will they not get insurance, but they're also facing a 25% cut in income.
How can any employer think that workers w/o health insurance work better than those who do? Most governments have figured out that the tax from cigarettes does not outweigh the cost to the economy of a sick worker, hence they are trying to get as many people to quit as possible. Health insurance is the same, the cost to keep workers healthy is worth it to have better workers. It also encourages the worker to stay with the company. The number of times I've heard of people moving job because where they were going had health insurance has to be some indication of it's worth to the employer.
I have a friend who has a company which has 53 full time employees.
He's been investigating how he can get rid of 5 of them, or at least convert them to part time, to escape this mandate.
Stair step functions have always been a problem when designing things like commission structures, and so on. If I make 6% commission on sales up to $10,000 a day, and 5% commission for sales of $20,000 a day or higher, then I get 6 cents on a dollar if I sell $10,000 or less and 5 cents on a dollar if I sell more. So if I sell $10,000, I get $600, but if I sell $10,001, I get $500.05; I don't break even until $12,000 in sales, where I make $600 again, and I don't start making money again until I start selling $12,001 ($600.05). You can be damn well sure that you aren't going to have any of your sales staff turning in total sales amounts between $10,001/day and $12,000/day, and if they are unable to get close to, but just under, the next point at which there's another stair, you can be damn sure there will be customers hearing "We're out of stock today, but we have a shipment coming in first thing tomorrow, I'll call you".
This whole "keep the insurance industry in business" welfare program for insurance companies this was a bad idea; if we are going to nationalize healthcare, we really should have gone single-payer and been done with it.
You're only now thinking that Obama is just as bad?
The rest of us were telling you that bad during the first election. And guess what? The next guy isn't going to be much better -- regardless of whether he's Mr. Red State or Mr. Blue State. Might even be worse. Unfortunately, these rah-rah Reddit teenagers that get little baby chubbies in their pants as soon as they're old enough to vote, because "if we just vote Obama/Romney/Whoever this time, we will finally make a change to the world because this will totally be different than the past 230 years!" keep coming in thinking shit is just on the verge of turning around. Naive idiots.
While I have been disappointed in Obama, I don't think he is to blame for most of our problems. The real problem is out of my control. I can voter for a decent president. I can't vote for a decent representative for every small minded gerry-mandered district in America. You can see many states, Blue and Red that elect knowledgeable people who are good at representing the voters.
But time and time again there are places that always elect the incumbent who has become too entrenched to do anything good, or pants on head crazy people who can't be reasoned with.
We still try to do our best...
Cheap storage VM.
its the most wonderful 'business men'. you know, the 'job creators'. all hail the job creators
I'm not sure why you mock. It is precisely unemployment fears that have driven this decision. Job creation is something that human employers do, and that's the only source of jobs. There is no job fairy.
Small businesses usually have employee compensation as their dominant cost. "Making payroll" is by far the chief worry of small business owners. If you raise the cost per employee, the number of employees per small business must fall. In a robust and growing economy you can get away with that - heck if things have been good for a while even small employers likely have some slack to pay workers a bit more. But when the economy has sucked for the past 5 years, there's just no slack to work with.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No the "rest of you" were telling us that he was a secret muslim terrorist hiding his birth cirtificate because it would show how he was planning to round up all the whiteys into FEMA camps and handing out their stolen wealth to the blacks and latinos while sucking the balls of Yemen, Crotkovia, and the Taliban.
Those of us that were paying attention noticed that as a senator during the race he voted to give the telecom companies retroactive immunity in the warrantless wiretapping fiasco. That put a big damper on my enthusiasm for him, but he was still LEAPS AND BOUNDS better than McCain and his psycho-crazy-VP choice from hell. It was also pretty indicative of his future policy.
And all that aside, he is WAY better than Bush. In some ways. And those ways are MASSIVLEY important. Now, Obama might be toeing the line to his corporate overlords and erroding civil rights just as much as Bush did, but he didn't unilaterally launch a pointless war costing trillions of dollars, thousands of US lives, and HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of civilian deaths. I just can't quite state how collosal of a fuckup invading Iraq was. Seriously. For all the spying that's happening under Obama's watch, he didn't launch any wars. This makes him vastly different and better.
The silver lining of the Supreme Court ruling, is that Obamacare is legally a tax. Mitch McConnell realized that taxes can be altered, or eliminated, in the budget reconciliation process. If the Republicans can get total control, even by slim majorities, Obamacare will die. Hillary Clinton is the best hope of keeping Obamacare alive.
More likely they will get rid of the employer mandate while retaining the individual mandate. The wealthy already have health care they can afford, so the individual mandate has little or no negative impact on them.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Wait so with a (D) President and a (D) Senate.....you think the problem is the house of representatives because "people aren't electing who they should be"?
Uhh, ok dude.