Corporations Get a Pass; You Don’t
Employers are off the hook for another year. The mandate to provide health insurance gets a twelve month reprieve. Will this be good for Democrats in the 2014 elections? One view:
Republican former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin called the move “deviously brilliant,” by removing a potential electoral impediment from in front of congressional Democrats before the midterms.
“Democrats no longer face the immediate specter of running against the fallout from a heavy regulatory imposition on employers across the land,” Holtz-Eakin wrote. “Explaining away the mandate was going to be a big political lift; having the White House airbrush it from the landscape is way better.”
I disagree. I think Democrats are panicking. Right now employees are experiencing all pain and no gain. Employers are:
- Reducing employee hours to less than 30 hours a week.
- Not hiring more than 49 employees.
- Making employees pay a premium for their coverage equal to the full amount allowed: 9.5% of wages.
- Reducing the employer contribution for spouses and dependents to zero.
- Raising deductibles and co-payments.
- And even ending health insurance coverage altogether.
Plus, the IRS has a twelve month look back period in deciding who is full-time or part-time and how many employees are actually working. So during 2014, employers will be making all kinds of adjustments that are bad for workers ― who will see all of the costs and none of the benefits prior to the November elections.
Corporations Get a Pass; You Don’t
Employers pay a portion of workers’ compensation in the form of fringe benefits. In other words, your employee health plan is not free; it’s a (non-cash) portion of your pay. Workers who would otherwise buy health coverage like this arrangement because health insurance they buy through work is tax free whereas individual coverage workers might purchase through an agent would be purchased with income that had been taxed. The different is nearly 50% depending on where you live and your marginal tax bracket.
Why am I not surprised by this?
Because you are used to getting screwed over.
I don’t see much disagreement here, both are right. The delay keeps the name ObamaCare out of the spotlight and retains public deniability for the problems (obviously not warranted deniability, but people will buy it). The informed will know better and will know where to assign blame for their pain, but are there really enough informed people?
add amnesty in and it may not matter what the truth is.
I don’t know how much it’ll keep it off the spotlight. Every other piece of the law will still be implemented by October..
But it still gives the illusion that it isn’t operating, yet. People can still say “well it hasn’t been fully implemented, that’s why there are problems.”
It’ll be interesting to see how successfully they misdirect. Who will be blamed now? Bush?
Probably greedy corporations, actually. We’ll be inundated with coverage on how companies are making record profits while cutting health care provisions.
On this being an electoral advantage…I just don’t see it. The provision is still going to be implemented right after and everyone knows that.
So they see the results of their expected policy, but don’t actually implement. Seems like a lose lose
If the President can summarily delay implementation of the ACA in spite of the statute’s requirement that the provisions “shall” be implemented on January 1, 2014, why can’t the President modify other parts of the law on his own?