White House Secretly Delays ObamaCare Mandate For Two More Years

by JASmius

The operative term, of course, and the one that makes this otherwise dog-bites-man story newsworthy, is "secret":

Another ObamaCare delay has taken effect, although you may not have heard.

The administration has quietly announced that it was delaying through October 2016 the [Una]ffordable Care[-Less] Act's individual mandate for millions of Americans who have lost their healthcare coverage.

Stop the tape.  So after costing millions of Americans the individual health insurance plans they liked, and forcibly bulldozing them into the O-Care cartels, and feeding them through the sticker-shock of higher premiums for inferior coverage, and severing them from the doctors they liked - a collectivist process that is five and a half months down the road and pretty darn near irreversible - NOW the Regime comes out and says, "Juuuuuuust kidding!" and gives those same millions of Americans a two year mulligan?  I dunno about all of you, but were I one of those millions, I wouldn't be "grateful," I'd be highly pissed.  Which helps explain why they whispered it instead.

And that's before you consider that it isn't a permanent stay of plan execution.  What good is a two year delay?  What does that accomplish for those who accept it other than to make them go through this whole miserable process all over again in the fall of 2016?  It's like going in for a knee scope and being "shunted" into emergency heart bypass surgery by mistake, then the mistake being discovered, then being opened back up and the heart bypass surgery being undone, then being told that it'll have to be re-performed two years from now.  And meanwhile, what about the bleeping knee scope?  "Oh, that's not covered under your ObamaCare plan."

That's the patient side of this foolishness.  The provider side is a mass, full-throated balkery as well:

State insurance commissioners and insurance companies must decide whether to offer plans that have already been canceled — and many have objected to the latest extension.

Also, many Americans have since been forced to find new policies, often facing higher premiums and deductibles or reduced coverage.

Why in the blue hell would any state insurance commissioner or insurance company re-introduce the plans that the Regime outlawed last fall when they're just going to be re-outlawed two years from now?  They balked at the last delay(s); why would this one be any different?  And for amply good reason: not only does it take a great deal of time and cost to jigger around coverages in time for annual open enrollment periods (remember, carriers spent three years preparing to comply with ObamaCare), but - and here is where the banana republicanism really comes in - since they're essentially being ordered to break the original law, you can absolutely count on the Regime double-crossing them by enforcing it later on - say, after the Democrats retain the White House in 2016, either by stealing another election or via O's coup de tat.  If I'm an insurance carrier CEO, there's no way in the bowels of shinola that I'm going to leave myself civilly and criminally exposed like that.  These people are already destroying my industry and marking my company for assimilation or destruction; I'll kindly pass on the orange jumpsuit to the extent that I can, thank you very much.

See, this is why Dick Morris's analysis is 180 degrees off:

Political consultant Dick Morris says the effect of this announcement with all the other Obamacare delays means that the act has now effectively been repealed.

"When you take the employer mandate that's been postponed, the small-business mandate that's been postponed, and the individual mandate that now has been given all kinds of escape clauses," he said, "you're essentially saying the boss doesn't have to provide it and you don't have to buy it. So, what's left?" he said on Newsmax TV's America's Forum.

"You don't have to buy insurance because there are all these escapes and your boss doesn't have to buy insurance if he is a small, medium or large business," he said. "This is to say any employer. And essentially now, all of it is postponed or overridden. So, it's really a [de facto] repeal."

A "de facto repeal" that can itself be rescinded at any moment.  That's the whole point.  A true repeal is legislation crafted, debated, and enacted by the Legislative Branch of the federal government - Congress - and signed into law by the President of the United States - currently and regrettably, Barack Obama.  Constitutional, legal, and MUCH more difficult to undo.  But now that Congress is an irrelevant anachronism and all it takes is a whim, and pen, and a phone, what the hell kind of "repeal" is that?  Not "de facto," that's for damn sure.

Republicans are calling it an attempt to "rig" the November midterm elections in the finest John Gotti tradition.  Given how the special House election in Florida-13 turned out a couple of days ago, however, that may be a forlorn hope for the White House.

But to me, the key is that they carried out this latest usurpation of Article I, Section I so surreptitiously.  Heretofore The One has made these unconstitutional revisions to ObamaCare with wide public fanfare in order to reap public goodwill and gratitude for their purported "flexibility" and "compassion" after all the "glitches" associated with the cataclysmic rollout.  What they received, instead, was public anger and skepticism, the latter even from some of their less fanatical supporters.  And with each successive pen-stroke, GOP howls of outrage at Red Barry's despotic seizures of the Legislative power have gotten louder and louder and by now have, in the White House's implicit estimation, made a definite impact.

So now they're back to the very sort of clandestine, cloak & dagger-ism for which the New New Left spent the Bush years disdaining La Clinton Nostra.

Too bad that that particular cat was let out of the bag - oh, about 1,878 days ago.