Focus on getting Obamacare right
When he took office in January 2009, President Barack Obama could have used his considerable political capital on one of several issues, including climate change and immigration reform. He chose instead to concentrate on health care reform. In due course, thanks to the efforts of the formidable then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a bill passed.
The Affordable Care Act was never meant to be the last word in health care. The White House said at the time it fully expected the law to be subject to subsequent tweaks and improvements and thus it had a drawn-out timetable for implementation.
But by 2011, the House was in Republican hands and the GOP was still stinging from the beating administered by the hated Pelosi. Not a single Republican voted for “Obamacare,” as it came to be known.
The tweaks and improvements never materialized. The House Republicans were in a position to block them and, in fact, voted 37 times to repeal the entire law. The only thing worse than Obamacare, in their eyes, was a successful health care plan with Obama’s name on it.
Faced with a fast-approaching deadline and a host of companies clearly unprepared to meet it, the Obama administration Tuesday announced a one-year delay in implementing a key provision of the act: penalties, at least $2,000 per employee, for large employers who do not provide health care coverage for their workers by Jan. 11, 2014. Those penalties will not take effect until January 2015.
Republicans immediately pronounced the delay as a sign Obamacare was a failure. The Obama administration didn’t help dispel this impression by announcing the delay while the president was out of the country, Congress was out of town and the public was preoccupied with the Fourth of July holiday.
Most large U.S. employers are unaffected by the law or the delay because they already provide adequate medical coverage to their workers. But a number of employers, especially in low-wage industries, bet heavily on the law being overturned by the Supreme Court or repealed by the Mitt Romney administration and a Republican Congress.
None of this came to pass and the employers who had counted on it found themselves with less than a year to prepare for the new law. Moreover, the creation of insurance exchanges to provide lower-cost insurance to individuals and smaller employers likely won’t be ready by the Oct. 1 deadline.
So far, the public hasn’t liked any of the GOP’s alternatives to the Affordable Care Act. And the cries that the U.S. has the best health care system in the world are increasingly hollow.
The delay is a setback for the Obama administration. The Republicans will have no end of political fun with it, but it’s more important that Obamacare be done right than done quickly.