For years, Democrats told Americans that healthcare was in a state of “crisis.” “We can’t wait,” they scolded, “we have to do something right now or people will die!” Healthcare was in a state of great emergency, and it was heartless to argue against the so-called reform that the Democrats pushed in the moment they happened to control Congress and the White House. The need was so urgent, according to Obama and the Democrats, that reform must be passed, without delay, and we must even fundamentally alter the citizen’s relationship to the state. The new law would force Americans to buy a product or face a fine, and would force employers to do the same, and these whole new state healthcare exchanges would be hastily built to bring about all this sweeping, but necessary we were told, change.
Three years after passing ObamaCare, in the dead of night, without bothering to let the American people even know what was in the bill, the Obama administration delayed the start of the employer mandate for at least a year. It was supposed to start January 1, 2014. Now it will start sometime in 2015.
There is no provision in the law for allowing the administration to delay it, just as there was no provision allowing it grant waivers to some companies, Big Labor, even whole states. The administration granted those waivers because it can, to avoid bad optics. Now it has granted itself a waiver from its own signature law. They announced the new waiver during the Independence Day week, when many Americans aren’t paying much attention to politics, to avoid having the law wreak havoc on employment and families’ insurance across the 2014 mid-term elections, when most Americans will be paying attention to politics.
If the Democrats can wait to implement it, couldn’t they have waited to pass it in the first place? Wouldn’t it have made sense to wait until they were sure they were passing a law that would actually do some good, instead of create chaos, and need so many waivers?
If healthcare was in a state of crisis before the law was passed, isn’t it still in a state of crisis? The law was passed, after all, but it hasn’t been implemented. The crisis therefore still exists.
If people were going to die without healthcare reform before, aren’t they going to die due to delaying its start by at least a year? Are Americans going to die just so Obama’s Democrats can avoid looking bad during an election year?
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