Thread: BOOM! Obamacare employer mandate delayed until 2015 This is huge people

BOOM! Obamacare employer mandate delayed until 2015



This is huge, people. As we reported earlier, according to the Washington Post, Democrats have been extremely worried about the 2014 midterms for one simple reason: Obamacare. Well, as a confirmation of this report, it looks like the employer mandate that was to go into effect in 2014 has now been delayed until 2015, or, just a few months after the midterm elections.

From Bloomberg:

Businesses won’t be penalized next year if they don’t provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its health-care law, two administration officials said.

The decision will come in regulatory guidance to be issued later this week. It addresses vehement complaints from employer groups about the administrative burden of reporting requirements, though it may also affect coverage provided to some workers.

The two officials, who asked not to be identified to discuss the move ahead of its announcement, said the administration decided to wait until 2015 before enforcing the employer mandate in order to simplify reporting requirements and give businesses more time to adapt their health-care coverage.

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act includes financial penalties on businesses with more than 50 employees that fail to provide health insurance that meets minimum standards and tests for affordability.

Read the Rest

The report says that the reason for the delay is to give businesses more time to comply with all the new regulations. We, of course, know the real reason for the delay: because Obamacare is going to do the same thing to the Democratic party in 2014 that it did in 2010.

I don’t think that the significance of this event can be overstated. Because even if the rhetoric is true and the bureaucrats in charge truly just want to give businesses more time to comply, they’re admitting that the mandate is complicated and burdensome for businesses.

We must continue to fight this fight and put pressure on our officials to repeal Obamacare. It is and will continue to be disastrous for our nation. It must go if we are to prosper.

http://poorrichardsnews.com/post/544...yed-until-2015

Administration delays key ObamaCare insurance mandate

Published July 02, 2013FoxNews.com

• July 1, 2013: President Barack Obama gestures white speaking during a news conference with Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete at the State House in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. (AP)
  

The Obama administration announced Tuesday that it is delaying a major provision in the health care overhaul, putting off until 2015 a requirement that many employers offer health insurance.
The announcement was made late Tuesday by the Treasury Department, at the beginning of the holiday week while Congress was on recess. It comes amid reports that the administration is running into roadblocks as it prepares to implement ObamaCare.
The change in the employer mandate is arguably the most significant concession the administration has made to date.
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., a critic of the law, seized on the delay as a "clear admission" that the law is "unaffordable, unworkable and unpopular."
"It's also a cynical political ploy to delay the coming train wreck associated with ObamaCare until after the 2014 elections," he said.
The law requires companies that employ 50 or more workers to offer coverage or face fines. The Treasury Department and the White House said that, based on complaints by employers that the system for reporting the coverage was too onerous, they would simplify that system and give employers an additional year to comply.
"We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively," Mark J. Mazur, the assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department, said in a statement posted online. "We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action."
The mandate was originally set to kick in for 2014, but will now start in 2015.
The decision effectively means that penalties that would have been assessed against non-compliant businesses will be delayed until 2015. The administration encouraged employers to provide insurance anyway.
While the employer mandate is being delayed, the so-called individual mandate -- the requirement that individuals obtain health insurance -- presumably remains on schedule for 2014.
The administration also still plans to open up a new marketplace for government-regulated insurance plans on Oct. 1, to take effect on Jan. 1. And a sprawling set of subsidies would also remain in place.
The delay of the employer mandate, though, raises questions about whether more elements of the law might be delayed in the coming months.
White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett explained that, on the employer mandate issue, the administration was making two changes.
"First, we are cutting red tape and simplifying the reporting process," she wrote on the White House blog. She cited concerns that the law would have required companies to set up new data collection systems on employee access to health care. She said: "Some of this detailed reporting may be unnecessary for businesses that more than meet the minimum standards in the law." So, she said, the administration plans to figure out a "smarter system."
Second, she said, the administration would delay the roll-out and penalties since they were overhauling the reporting system.
"This allows employers the time to test the new reporting systems and make any necessary adaptations to their health benefits while staying the course toward making health coverage more affordable and accessible for their workers," she said.
Randy Johnson, senior vice president of Labor, Immigration, and Employee Benefits at the Chamber of Commerce, told Fox News that with its decision, the administration has "finally recognized the obvious."
"Employers need more time and clarification of the rules of the road before implementing the employer mandate," he said. "We will continue to work to alleviate this and other problems with ObamaCare."
Fox News' Jim Angle contributed to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...rance-mandate/

PHARMA & HEALTHCARE

7/02/2013 @ 6:21PM |10,234 views

White House To Delay Obamacare's Employer Mandate Until 2015; Far-Reaching Implications For The Private Health Insurance Market

Avik Roy, Contributor


“First,” wrote Treasury official Mark Mazur in a statement, the delay “will allow us to consider ways to simplify the new reporting requirements consistent with the law. Second, it will provide time to adapt health coverage and reporting systems while employers are moving toward making health coverage affordable and accessible for their employees.” (Mazur’s full statement is appended to the end of this article.)

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* * *

Will more employers dump coverage if the mandate is delayed?

As a matter of background, Section 1513/4890H of the Affordable Care Act requires that all firms with more than 50 full-time-equivalent employees—defined as 120 hours per month—offer government-certified health coverage to their workers, or pay a steep fine. For more details on how the mandate works, and how it incentivizes firms to offer “unaffordable” coverage to their workers, read mypiece on the topic from May 21.
In the short term, the delay will have several effects. First, the mandate drives up the cost of labor, and therefore increases unemployment; delaying the mandate by one year may modestly mitigate that disincentive.
Most importantly, the delay of the mandate means that more people will want to enroll in Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges. Every year, fewer and fewer employers offer health coverage; given one more year to restructure their workforces, this process could accelerate.

There’s been a lot of debate as to whether or not Obamacare incentivizes employers to drop coverage for their employees. A 2011 survey of employers by McKinsey & Co. found that 30 percent of employers “definitely or probably” would stop offering coverage after 2014; among those who felt that they had the most knowledge of the law’s inner workings, that number rose to 50 percent.
However, the Congressional Budget Office, in a2012 report, argued that employers do not have a large incentive to dump workers’ coverage. And even if employers dropped coverage for an additional 20 million workers relative to the CBO’s projections, the deficit would not increase, says the CBO, because the subsidies paid to low-income workers would be offset by an increase in tax revenue from lower utilization of the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance.
In general, it would appear that with the rollout of Obamacare’s exchanges in 2014, paired with a delay of the employer mandate until 2015, many more people may enroll in the exchanges. This is both good and bad: good, because it’s a good thing for people to buy insurance on their own, rather than having it bought on their behalf by someone else with their money; bad, because the exchanges are proving to be quite costly, though comparable in cost to premiums in the employer-sponsored market today.
Does Obama have the legal authority to delay the mandate?
The Affordable Care Act is quite clear as to the effective date of the employer mandate. “The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013,” concludes Section 1513.

The executive branch is charged with enforcing the law, and it can of course choose not to enforce the law if it wants. But people can sue the federal government, and a judge could theoretically force the administration to enforce the mandate.
So the question is: Would anyone sue the Obama administration over this? Employers, of course, will be thrilled to be spared the mandate for one more year. Democratic politicians, similarly, will be glad to have this not hanging over their heads for the 2014 mid-term election.
The wild-card is left-wing activists. Most, you’d think, would defer to the administration on questions of implementation. I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that all it would take is for one judge to issue an injunction, for an activist to require the administration to enforce the mandate.
Delay could help to unravel the employer-sponsored insurance market
Health wonks of every persuasion, myself included, have long argued that the original sin of the U.S. health-care system is the quirk in the tax code that incentivizes people to get health coverage through their employers, instead of shopping for it on their own.
If you like Obamacare, and you want it to work, you don’t need the employer mandate. Democrats put the employer mandate in Obamacare because the President was worried that, without a mandate, employers would dump coverage, violating his oft-repeated promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep it.” Before Mitt Romney signed Massachusetts’ health-reform bill into law, he vetoed that state’s employer mandate. The heavily Democratic legislature overrode his veto.
Even if the Obama administration’s delay lasts for only one year, that delay will give firms time to restructure their businesses to avoid offering costly coverage, leading to an expansion of the individual insurance market and a shrinkage of the employer-sponsored market. Remember that the administration is not delaying the individual mandate, which requires most Americans to buy health coverage or face a fine.
But delaying the employer mandate could lead, ultimately, to its repeal, which would do much to transition our insurance market from an employer-sponsored one to an individually-purchased one. Indeed, earlier this year, abill to do just that was introduced by Rep. Charles Boustany (R., La.) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah). If the employer mandate were to ultimately be repealed, or never implemented, today’s news may turn out to be one of the most significant developments in health care policy in recent memory.

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Treasury Dept.: Obamacare’s implementation ‘careful, thoughtful’

Here is the statement issued today by Mark Mazur, Assistant Secretary for Tax policy at the Treasury Department:

​Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner

Over the past several months, the Administration has been engaging in a dialogue with businesses – many of which already provide health coverage for their workers – about the new employer and insurer reporting requirements under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively. We recognize that the vast majority of businesses that will need to do this reporting already provide health insurance to their workers, and we want to make sure it is easy for others to do so. We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action.
The Administration is announcing that it will provide an additional year before the ACA mandatory employer and insurer reporting requirements begin. This is designed to meet two goals. First, it will allow us to consider ways to simplify the new reporting requirements consistent with the law. Second, it will provide time to adapt health coverage and reporting systems while employers are moving toward making health coverage affordable and accessible for their employees. Within the next week, we will publish formal guidance describing this transition. Just like the Administration’s effort to turn the initial 21-page application for health insurance into a three-page application, we are working hard to adapt and to be flexible about reporting requirements as we implement the law.
Here is some additional detail. The ACA includes information reporting (under section 6055) by insurers, self-insuring employers, and other parties that provide health coverage. It also requires information reporting (under section 6056) by certain employers with respect to the health coverage offered to their full-time employees. We expect to publish proposed rules implementing these provisions this summer, after a dialogue with stakeholders – including those responsible employers that already provide their full-time work force with coverage far exceeding the minimum employer shared responsibility requirements – in an effort to minimize the reporting, consistent with effective implementation of the law.
Once these rules have been issued, the Administration will work with employers, insurers, and other reporting entities to strongly encourage them to voluntarily implement this information reporting in 2014, in preparation for the full application of the provisions in 2015. Real-world testing of reporting systems in 2014 will contribute to a smoother transition to full implementation in 2015.
We recognize that this transition relief will make it impractical to determine which employers owe shared responsibility payments (under section 4980H) for 2014. Accordingly, we are extending this transition relief to the employer shared responsibility payments. These payments will not apply for 2014. Any employer shared responsibility payments will not apply until 2015.
During this 2014 transition period, we strongly encourage employers to maintain or expand health coverage. Also, our actions today do not affect employees’ access to the premium tax credits available under the ACA (nor any other provision of the ACA).​

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UPDATE: Ezra Klein writes that “Obamacare’s employer mandate shouldn’t be delayed. It should be repealed.” Ezra notes that, in 2009, he called the employer mandate “health-care reform’s worst idea yet,” because it would disproportionately harm low-income workers:

You can pretty much see where this is going: workers from low-income families become more expensive than workers from high-income families. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains, “Employers would have strong incentives to tilt hiring toward people who have a spouse with a good income (or have health coverage through a family member), teenagers whose parents make a decent living, and people without children (since the eligibility limit for the subsidies in the new health insurance exchanges will increase with family size). Low-income women with children in one-earner families would be particularly disadvantaged.”

INVESTORS’ NOTE: Cigna CI -0.95% (CI), WellPoint WLP -0.33% (WLP),Humana HUM -2.65% (HUM), UnitedHealth UNH -0.55% (UNH) and Aetna AET -1.45%(AET) are the largest publicly-traded sponsors of employer-based health insurance.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapoth...urance-market/

July 2nd, 2013
06:21 PM ET
1 hour ago

Key Obamacare provision delayed

Video at the Page Link: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...ayed/?on.cnn=3
Posted by
CNN's Kevin Liptak

Updated at 7:40 p.m. ET on Tuesday, July 2

Washington (CNN) - The requirement that businesses provide their workers with health insurance or face fines – a key provision contained in President Barack Obama's sweeping health care law – will be delayed by one year, the Treasury Department said Tuesday.

The postponement came after business owners expressed concerns about the complexity of the law’s reporting requirements, the agency said in its announcement. Under the Affordable Care Act, businesses employing 50 or more full-time workers that don't provide them health insurance will be penalized.

"We recognize that the vast majority of businesses that will need to do this reporting already provide health insurance to their workers, and we want to make sure it is easy for others to do so. We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action," Mark J. Mazur, assistant secretary for tax policy, wrote in a post on the website of the Treasury Department, which is tasked with implementing the employer mandate.

Mazur said the extra year before the requirement goes into effect will allow the government time to assess ways to simplify the reporting process for businesses. Penalties for firms not providing health coverage to employees will now begin in 2015 – after next year’s congressional elections.

The new delay will not affect other aspects of the health law, including the establishment of exchanges in states for low-income Americans to obtain health insurance.

Supporters of the employer mandate note that most firms already provide health insurance to full time workers, and downplay the effect the requirement would have on small businesses, citing figures showing the vast majority of small businesses employ fewer than 50 workers.

But opponents claim the employer mandate is a potential job killer, saying businesses near the 50-worker cutoff will be unlikely to ramp up hiring if it means they're required to provide employees health insurance.

READ MORE: Myths about Obamacare

“The administration has finally recognized the obvious – employers need more time and clarification of the rules of the road before implementing the employer mandate,” said Randy Johnson, a vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a business group.

Obama's administration has previously expressed openness to making the health care law easier to implement, and acted to shorten applications for health insurance on government-run exchanges from 21 pages to three.

On Tuesday, Obama’s senior adviser Valerie Jarrett – who acts as the White House’s liaison to big business – wrote the new delay was indicative of the administration’s determination to implement the health care law effectively and fairly, and that it wouldn’t affect other aspects of Obamacare.

“While major portions of the law have yet to be implemented, it’s already a little more affordable for businesses to offer quality health coverage to their employees,” Jarrett wrote, adding later:

“As we implement this law, we have and will continue to make changes as needed. In our ongoing discussions with businesses we have heard that you need the time to get this right.”

READ MORE: How the next battle over Obamacare could be the ugliest yet

Yet many Republicans – and even some Democrats - have continued to express serious concerns about the roll-out of Obamacare. On Tuesday, GOP lawmakers said the delay of the employer mandate didn’t go far enough.

“This announcement means even the Obama administration knows the 'train wreck' will only get worse,” House Speaker John Boehner wrote.

"Obamacare costs too much and it isn’t working the way the administration promised,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, wrote in response to the decision, adding: “The fact remains that Obamacare needs to be repealed and replaced with common-sense reforms that actually lower costs for Americans."

Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, was more succinct. "The best delay for ObamaCare is a permanent one," he wrote on Twitter.

Some Democrats have also voiced concern about the roll-out of the health law – Sen. Max Baucus, a key Democrat who helped craft the legislation, expressed serious anxiety in April about its rollout.

"The administration's public information campaign on the benefits of the Affordable Care Act deserves a failing grade. You need to fix this," Baucus told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at a hearing.

"I just see a huge train wreck coming down," he added later.

READ MORE: Six companies cashing in on Obamacare


http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...ayed/?on.cnn=3

Obama Administration Gives Businesses a One-Year Reprieve on Health-Care Mandate

CNBC – 3 hours ago
@cnbc on Twitter

The Obama administration will give employers an extra year to comply with the requirement that they provide employees with health care.

Businesses will now have until 2015 to comply with the Affordable Care Act, sometimes referred to as "Obamacare."

"We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively," the Treasury Department said in a statement. "We recognize that the vast majority of businesses that will need to do this reporting already provide health insurance to their workers, and we want to make sure it is easy for others to do so. We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action."

The administration plans to continue a dialogue with employers about the Affordable Care Act and publish proposed rules sometime this summer, the Treasury said in the statement. Real-world testing of the program will begin in 2014 with a full implementation in 2015, they said.

"During this 2014 transition period, we strongly encourage employers to maintain or expand health coverage," they said.

This story is developing. Please check back for further updates.

Also Read


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obama-...214554318.html

AFP Responds to Delay in Implementation of ObamaCare

July 03, 2013

Arlington, VA- Following the announcement from the Obama Administration to delay the implementation of ObamaCare by a year before it even begins, Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips released the following statement.

“It is increasingly obvious that the Obama Administration is nowhere near ready to deal with the countless negative consequences their own law creates. The delay amounts to an admission that forcing small businesses to comply with more onerous regulations only hurts jobs and slows the economy. Further, the decision to postpone implementation until after November 2014 appears motivated by deceptive politics, rather than an honest effort to protect small businesses from the painful conditions ObamaCare creates.”

http://americansforprosperity.org/ne...-of-obamacare/