
Is it that most Democrats just think health insurance companies have access to Uncle Scrooge McDuck’s Money Bin and can always find more money from somewhere when they need it?
Think about it. Republicans in Congress were willing to go through with a shutdown in an effort to force a delay in the individual mandate specifically because it would greatly increase the odds of the whole thing collapsing within a year. And now, three weeks after Democrats fought through the shutdown and declared, “over my dead body!” … it’s looking extremely likely. Maybe by the time this e-mail reaches you, maybe the delay will be official.
We have a delay in the sign-up period, but not a delay in the individual mandate deadline…. so far.
The White House is delaying the deadline to
buy health insurance by six weeks amid growing House Democratic
concerns that the ObamaCare enrollment site’s botched rollout will
prevent them from winning the House in 2014.
ObamaCare requires people to have health
insurance by March 31, 2014. To guarantee the coverage, people must
begin the process of applying for insurance no later than Feb. 15.
Under the change, people who have signed up
for insurance by the end of March will not face a penalty even if they
do not actually have the insurance.
White House officials on Wednesday argued
this would not be a delay of the individual mandate because the March 31
date for having insurance would remain.
They also noted on Twitter that people would still have to have coverage in the 2014 tax year.
“Individual mandate timing hasn’t changed,”
White House spokesman Josh Earnest tweeted. “[The] deadline for having
insurance is 3/31. Was true this [morning]. Is true tonight.”
Do the Democrats who’ve been championing this law actually know how it works? It’s one thing for someone like Rubio
to push the idea of delaying the mandate knowing that his proposal will
go nowhere; it’s a crafty way to put Dems on the defensive politically.
But now Democrats themselves are murmuring about delaying enrollment,
which risks the same too many sick/not enough healthy financial
nightmare for insurance companies, as a viable solution. It’s not
viable. It’s not even viable if you subscribe to the “liberals designed
ObamaCare to fail” theory. Even if that’s true, they wouldn’t design it
to fail so badly that it might shake the public’s faith in liberal
technocracy; that makes the goal of eventually selling people on
single-payer harder, not easier. And they wouldn’t design it to fail immediately,
when the public’s still skeptical of ObamaCare. To build support for
greater statist control of health care, they need to impress people by
showing that their contraption can run smoothly for awhile. Then, years
from now, when they have a majority in Congress again, they can start
touting single-payer as the key to lowering health-care costs for
everyone. A meltdown on the federal exchange right out of the gate
followed by skyrocketing premiums nationwide as the industry copes with
the death spiral is … not helpful to that project. Which brings me back
to my question. What are Shaheen, Pascrell, and Wasserman-Schultz doing
touting a partial solution that’s apt to lead to the worst-case
scenario? If you can’t fix the website immediately, your only option is
to delay the law in its entirety so that insurers aren’t stuck figuring
out a way to pay for preexisting conditions next year with no new
revenue.
The sudden enthusiasm for delaying the individual mandate is a mind-boggling turn of events, considering the administration’s line last month that delaying the individual mandate was the policy equivalent of the Ghostbusters crossing the streams:
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