Federal government announces one-year delay of ObamaCare’s employer mandate
by Naomi Lopez-Bauman If ObamaCare weren’t already enough of a train wreck, the irony of the U.S. Treasury Department blog post announcing the delay of the ObamaCare employer mandate – titled Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner – would be hysterical. The employer mandate is a provision of ObamaCare that requires employers with 50...
by Naomi Lopez-Bauman
If ObamaCare weren’t already enough of a train wreck, the irony of the U.S. Treasury Department blog post announcing the delay of the ObamaCare employer mandate – titled Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner – would be hysterical.
The employer mandate is a provision of ObamaCare that requires employers with 50 or more employees to offer government-certified health insurance coverage or pay fines (up to $3,000 per employee) beginning on Jan. 1, 2014. With this delay, the mandate is now slated to go into effect in 2015.
According to the post by Mark J. Mazur, Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy:
We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively. We recognize that the vast majority of businesses that will need to do this reporting already provide health insurance to their workers, and we want to make sure it is easy for others to do so. We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action. The Administration is announcing that it will provide an additional year before the ACA mandatory employer and insurer reporting requirements begin. … We recognize that this transition relief will make it impractical to determine which employers owe shared responsibility payments (under section 4980H) for 2014. Accordingly, we are extending this transition relief to the employer shared responsibility payments. These payments will not apply for 2014. Any employer shared responsibility payments will not apply until 2015.
It may come as a surprise to some, but there is a broad consensus across the ideological spectrum that the employer mandate is bad policy. For example, some of the nation’s most liberal and conservative think tanks agree that the employer mandate is a job killer – and may affect the lowest-wage workers the hardest.
That is why this delay is welcome news for Illinois. Not only has the state’s employment decreased and unemployment increased since the beginning of the year, but the state is also in the midst of a fiscal crisis and consistently has an unemployment rate above the national average.
The question now becomes: Why delay its implementation for one year? Rather than granting a yearlong reprieve, lawmakers should take it upon themselves to repeal (at a minimum) this provision of the law.
Even if one believes that this delay reflects a sincere desire to provide flexibility to the nation’s employers, one has to wonder why the individual mandate, which requires individuals to purchase health insurance by Jan. 1 or pay a fine, remains unaffected. After all, a recent Gallup poll found that 43 percent of uninsured Americans – those who would be subject to the individual mandate – were unaware of it. And this despite spending $30 million on public relations campaigns to promote awareness of the new health care law.
Train wreck, indeed.