The Obamacare law was a failure to begin with, and as Nancy Pelosi said, we’d have to pass it before we could see what was in it. Now America is getting the picture. Obamacare isn’t ready for prime time, and should be repealed. Louise Radnofsky reports in The Wall Street Journal on the Obama administration’s delaying of one of the key provisions of the bill, the employer mandate, until after the 2014 election.
The Obama administration said Tuesday it would delay enforcing a provision of the new health-care law that requires large employers to provide coverage for workers or pay a penalty in 2014, the biggest revision so far to the federal health-care overhaul.
The law, passed in 2010, requires companies with the equivalent of 50 or more full-time workers to offer health benefits starting on Jan. 1—or pay a penalty of at least $2,000 per employee. The delay, announced by the Treasury Department in a blog post Tuesday, means that penalty won’t kick in until 2015.
The decision reflects pressure from companies in such lower-wage industries as restaurants, retail and agriculture, which had cited a host of practical difficulties posed by the law’s requirements. Most large companies in the U.S. already provide health coverage to their employees.
Some companies had bet the law was going to be overturned by the Supreme Court last year, or by a new presidential administration after the 2012 election. After it withstood those legal and political challenges, some firms said there was too little time remaining before the provision was due to kick in.
