Are You Kidding?

At Spence Asset Management we follow the healthcare industry. There was apocalyptic news on the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) from the White House earlier this week. Nobody in the news media said much after administration officials announced a unilateral decision to delay the law's insurance mandate for businesses. The delay applied only to businesses…..NOT FOR INDIVIDUALS.

Say what?

The employer mandate is absolutely the CENTERPIECE for ObamaCare's claim of providing universal healthcare coverage. All companies with 50 or more "employee equivalents" were to pay a $2,000 penalty per full-time employee if they didn't provide government-approved health insurance starting in January of 2014.

Suddenly the government is canceling the insurance reporting rules and tax enforcement provisions of the law until 2015? Are you serious?

White House officials told members of the press that the "complexity of the requirements" is the reason for the delay. That is utter bullshit. Clearly our federal government, which moves at a glacial pace on every task, cannot get its information technology up to speed despite having years to prepare. Processing and cross-checking paperwork for nearly six million businesses in the U.S. might take forever at the pace public employees move.

Unfortunately, too few Americans were paying attention when this legislation was thoughtlessly written and then crammed past all the credible objections of Congress. The critical details in the law were missing and it was going to be up to the bureaucracy to figure out how it would control an additional 16% of the U.S. economy.

This ridiculous law creates an employer-mandate system that will require every business to track and report every full-time employee's hours of service on a monthly basis. Because they have to…..businesses have been scrambling, working hard to comply and protect themselves from the fines.

Here comes the most stupid aspect of this entire debacle. Individuals are only supposed to be eligible for ObamaCare's health insurance subsidies if their employer doesn't offer the right benefits. With the employer mandate delayed for a year how can the Treasury Department possibly know which citizens qualify for subsidies in 2014. Now the government is going to lack the information that businesses were supposed to provide to enforce the individual mandate. By law individuals must also pay the individual mandate-tax if they decline coverage from their employer. How will the Treasury verify what was offered?

This is stupid and it is also a not very surprising reality that applies to big government. While businesses scrambled to comply with this massively insane law our bureaucrats did what they do nearly 100% of the time. They worked at 1/3^rd speed to hold up their end of the law.

Now this White House thinks it can selectively enforce certain aspects of this law. And why not? The White House does the same thing on immigration violations, welfare reform's work requirements, and No Child Left Behind waivers.

When is enough going to be enough? How can anyone remain silent about this? Shame on you John Roberts. Shame on anyone who supports this crap.