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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.
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.
That's because, as any intelligent person knows at this point, the republicans and democrats are two faces of the same coin.
No one has approached or even mentioned the real reason for healthcare cost increases over the last 30 years. There is a little law that goes by the acronym EMTALA. Go read about it and apply a little economics to the equation.
Simply stated, our masters have no desire to reduce the cost of healthcare because there is too much money to be made from a completely captive audience. Whether you take the capitalist point of view or the socialist point of view, the end result is the same - we the people get screwed out of our earnings and don't have a choice in the matter. The status quo is maintained.
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.
I pay about $65/wk ($3380/yr) into my employer healthcare. They pay about 3 times that ($10140/yr). Multiply that by the roughly 450 employees on the plan and it's the single greatest expense they have after employee salaries and taxes.
Personally, I'd much rather take that $13500 (my cost plus theirs) in my paycheck so I could shop around for my own insurance. The employer offered plan includes tons of crap for women and children that don't apply to me, while omitting many things that would be a huge help to me such as hearing aids.
Making health insurance/care portable would go a LONG way to making the entire system more competitive and the customers a lot happier, but the system (legally, financially, and historically) is basically set up to make sure that the cash flow for the insurance companies remains reliable (and growing). Do you expect an industry with a grip on about 1.5 trillion dollars of spending annually to just give it up? Hah.
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.