The editors of the Chicago Tribune ding Healthcare.gov:
We encouraged a one-year delay in the law. We recognize that’s not going to happen. Obamacare is here. It’s time, though, for the Obama administration to level with Americans about what’s happening here. It’s time to stop blaming Republicans and start talking about what needs to change.
The administration can do one thing — apparently on its own — to spare many Americans. It can delay the requirement that everyone buy insurance by March 31 or pay a penalty. Federal officials already have granted a one-year reprieve to the mandate that most employers provide insurance to their workers or pay a penalty. The administration cut a sweet deal for Congress and its staffers, who will continue to get generous federal subsidies. It has allowed any number of carve-outs for special pleaders.
A delay in the individual mandate would not be a special favor to American consumers. It’s a matter of fairness.
There are many major problems with doing that, problems so major that I find any delay or even an admission of error hard to imagine. So, for example, delaying the “individual mandate” would give its opponents more time to mount their opposition and would guarantee that Healthcare.gov was an issue in the midterm elections. How would you like to be a Democrat in a district that went for Romney in 2012 being forced to defend a program that even its proponents would have to acknowledge wasn’t ready for primetime?
Additionally, it would provide additional time for the economic implications of the program to become clearer. Some advocates of the PPACA might think that would be beneficial to their case but the Obama Administration apparently doesn’t. We’ve heard a lot less about the PPACA’s triumphs over the last few weeks and a lot more about growing pains. If the administration were more confident about it, we’d be hearing solely about its merits.
Damningly, a delay would be taken as an acknowledgement that the faction of House Republican firebrands who’ve demanded a delay in the PPACA individual mandate as the minimum requirement to avoid shutting down the federal government or raising the debt ceiling had a point.
Wouldn’t the most likely result of eliminating the individual mandate _while_ keeping the exchanges running be an immediate death spiral in which all of the young, healthy people either fail to insure themselves or fail to pay their premiums, but all of the people with higher medical needs sign up. Would that imbalance be correctable by year 2 or would the insurance premiums skyrocket based upon the known risk pools and the increased uncertainty of the government’s actions?
When policy decisions are based on political strategies aimed at consolidating power through winning elections, the lens is focused on short term gains rather than long term benefits. Consequently, the PPACA roll-out glitches serve the administration’s 2014 midterm aspirations better to be happening now, not in the headlights of an imminent election cycle. Plus, people tend to get used to and adapt to problems, especially if the powers that-be constantly spin the “there are no problems” meme, which the dem party is busily doing at the moment.
@PD
Yeah. I think that would be the end result. After all, from what I’ve read, the IM was necessary to get the insurance companies to go along with, inter alia, the doing away with the preexisting-condition exclusion.
And, BTW, I’m not in the camp of those who say that young folks won’t get insurance because, well, they’re young folks. My intuition is that they will sign up. I don’t think they’re so consumed with the business of being young that health insurance is not important to them. I suspect that most who don’t have it are deterred by the belief that it would be prohibitively expensive. But from what I’ve read, bronze policies are not that expensive. Time will tell, of course.