Obamacare delays prove conservatives’ point

Better someone think you’re a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt. If there were any doubt that Obamacare is an unworkable, self-contradictory mess before last week, President Obama has done conservatives a huge favor by removing it.

Mr. Obama’s decision to quietly delay several major components of the law, including its onerous mandate that employers provide health insurance, has done more to prove conservatives’ point than any argument made before or since the law’s drafting.

As someone who, unlike many members of Congress, has actually read the law and is familiar with health care policy, it was never a difficult argument to make. Obamacare is full of so many conflicting goals and self-defeating measures that it makes a Rube Goldberg contraption look like an ideal of aesthetic design.

The argument – that Obamacare is self-defeating and unworkable – was as easy to make as it was difficult to prove. Democrats could always point to the magical powers of government to claim that the law’s myriad regulations, taxes and reforms really would expand access to health care while lowering its cost.

They could always claim that the government was going to wring so much efficiency out of the health care market that it would make up for any increase in demand, bending the so-called cost-curve downward and saving everyone big bags of money.

All conservatives could do was point out the illogic of these claims. We had no data, no trials, no experience to back up our theories. Until now.

By delaying the implementation of key parts of the law, the administration has acknowledged that conservatives were right: Obamacare is unworkable. Putting off the employer mandate is not an act of administrative flexibility, as the White House claims, but an admission that neither the government nor the private sector can figure out how to make the mandate work.

I’ll spare you a long explanation of why the mandate is unworkable. Suffice it to say that the regulations proffered by the Treasury Department were so confusing that not even the most sophisticated corporations, with their armies of lawyers and consultants, could navigate the regulatory labyrinth that is the employer mandate.

There’s no fixing it either. In all likelihood, the Obama administration will simply – and quietly – effectively waive the mandate for many employers, or at least give them an easy way to avoid it. The government will most likely administratively rewrite the law into a simpler form of the mandate in a desperate attempt to create even basic functionality.

Another, less-well-known, part of the law the government delayed is the verification procedure for determining who is eligible for Obamacare’s personal-insurance subsidies. In this case, the feds admitted that there is no way for them to effectively verify that a person claiming to be eligible for insurance subsidies actually is eligible. Why? Because the system for doing so is simply unworkable.

This is actually two delayed programs in one. The first is a delay in checking whether a person is eligible for affordable health coverage through their employer. Because the employer mandate is unworkable, it’s impossible for the government to know who is and who is not eligible for employer-sponsored insurance.

The second is an admission by the Obama administration that it won’t actually be checking the income levels of people applying for subsidies, despite the fact that they are intended for the working poor. The reason, again, is that doing so is simply not a feasible thing for the government to do.

The subsidy program is such a mess that the government is simply going to hand out money to anyone who claims to be eligible.

It may not be long before the dreaded individual mandate is neutered or delayed too. If the administration can’t check the incomes of people applying for subsidies, how is it ever going to verify – via the tax code, mind you – that every American has health insurance?

The answer to that question is largely moot, however, because the argument is essentially over. Obamacare is failing. Conservatives have been proved correct; the law is simply too complex to ever work as intended and will continue to collapse under its own weight.

President Obama’s signature undertaking is every bit the failure conservatives argued it would be, and he’s just admitted it.

 

Matt Cover is Content Editor at Rare. Follow him on Twitter @MattCover

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