ObamaCare's Secret Mandate Exemption

◼ HHS quietly repeals the individual purchase rule for two more years. - Wall St. Journal

ObamaCare's implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn't think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week....

Keep in mind that the White House argued at the Supreme Court that the individual mandate to buy insurance was indispensable to the law's success, and President Obama continues to say he'd veto the bipartisan bills that would delay or repeal it. So why are ObamaCare liberals silently gutting their own creation now?

The answers are the implementation fiasco and politics. HHS revealed Tuesday that only 940,000 people signed up for an ObamaCare plan in February, bringing the total to about 4.2 million, well below the original 5.7 million projection. The predicted "surge" of young beneficiaries isn't materializing even as the end-of-March deadline approaches, and enrollment decelerated in February.

Meanwhile, a McKinsey & Company survey reports that a mere 27% of people joining the exchanges were previously uninsured through February. The survey also found that about half of people who shopped for a plan but did not enroll said premiums were too expensive, even though 80% of this group qualify for subsidies. Some substantial share of the people ObamaCare is supposed to help say it is a bad financial value. You might even call it a hardship.

DRUDGE HEADLINES:
Pop Singer Lance Bass Visits White House to Discuss ObamaCare...
OK Man Loses Insurance Due to Law, Owes $100K in Bills...
900,000 Obamacare 'enrollees' still haven't paid for coverage?
42-sign ups a minute needed to reach goal...
OR exchange fails to attract young...
FLASHBACK: Feds drop $3.2m on ads featuring guitar-strumming hipsters...
WSJ: Secret Mandate Exemption...
HHS: We Lack 'Statutory Authority' to Extend Open Enrollment Period...
RUBIO: Dem goal is single-payer system...

House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers: “He may have his pen and his phone, but we have the Constitution, and we must abide by it.”

◼ House to Vote on Bill to Stop ‘Imperial Presidency’ Next Week - Washington Free Beacon

he House will continue its efforts to push back against the “imperial presidency” next week, by voting on additional legislation that would allow Congress to challenge executive moves in federal court.

“Clearly President Obama has taken the über presidency to a whole new level,” McMorris Rodgers said. “While it’s not new for presidents to stretch their constitutional limits of power, executive overreach has accelerated at a faster pace under President Obama.”

“Throughout his tenure we have witnessed a pattern,” she said. “When the president disagrees with laws, he ignores them. And now that Obamacare isn’t working, President Obama is rewriting his own law on a whim.”

“He may have his pen and his phone, but we have the Constitution, and we must abide by it,” McMorris Rodgers said.

Republican complaints against Obama’s unilateral actions were only exacerbated this week when the administration announced that individuals would be able to keep their so-called “substandard” health insurance plans that do not comply with Obamacare until October 2017.

“This is just another example of the president picking and choosing portions of the law that he wants to enforce,” McMorris Rodgers said. “If you’ve spent any time around the legislative process, you know that there’s a big difference between the word ‘shall’ and ‘may.’ And you don’t have the choice when you are implementing the law to decide that you’re going to treat it as a ‘may.’ And that is what this president is doing.”

“[Obama] is unilaterally deciding what portions of the law he is going to implement and how and when he’s going to go about that,” she said.

Krauthammer: Obama ‘wakes up in the morning and decides what the law is going to be’

◼ “So here we’re going to go through a complete revolution of one-sixth of the U.S. economy — the dislocation of doctors, hospital, patients and plans everywhere, including insurers — in order to achieve a result in a decade where we have essentially the same number of uninsured. So what was this all about?” - Daily Caller

◼ Obamacare is what Obama wants it to be - Washington Examiner Editorial

The employer mandate move is merely the latest in a long list of unilateral changes Obama has made to his signature law. His administration delayed the implementation of income verification requirements for those applying for federal health insurance subsidies; minimized the impact of a “reinsurance fee” on labor union health care plans; and announced he wouldn’t enforce rules in the law that had spurred insurers to cancel millions of health care plans, undercutting his promise that those who liked their plan could keep it.

The actual text of the legislation he signed is secondary to what best serves his political purpose at the time. While Republicans are attacked for wanting to sabotage Obamacare whenever they propose reasonable changes through the constitutional legislative process, it has been deemed perfectly acceptable for Obama to unilaterally make sweeping alterations.

OBAMA: 'I Can Do Whatever I Want'...

◼ MAKING IT UP AS HE GOES: EMPLOYER MANDATE DELAYED AGAIN - LOUISE RADNOFSKY and THEO FRANCIS /Wall St. Journal ◼ Via Drudge

Most employers won't face a fine next year if they fail to offer workers health insurance, the Obama administration said Monday, in the latest big delay of the health-law rollout.

◼ Obama Rewrites Obamacare - Wall St. Journal

Another day, another lawless exemption, once again for business.

◼ BOEHNER: Exempts Corporations, Not Families

“Once again, the president is giving a break to corporations while individuals and families are still stuck under the mandates of his health care law. And, once again, the president is rewriting law on a whim. If the administration doesn’t believe employers can manage the burden of the law, how can struggling families be expected to? This continued manipulation by the president breeds confusion and erodes Americans’ confidence in him and his health care law. We need fairness for all, with relief from ObamaCare for every American.”

◼ Directly Violates Text of Affordable Care Act - CNS News

President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department issued a new regulation today that for the second time directly violates the plain and unambiguous text of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by allowing some businesses to avoid the law’s Dec. 31, 2013 deadline to provide health insurance coverage to their employees.

Initially, on July 2, 2013, the administration unilaterally delayed the deadline for the employer mandate until 2015. Now, the administration is unilaterally delaying it for some businesses until 2016....

In sum, the law says that employers with “at least 50 full-time employees” must provide “minimum essential coverage” in the “months beginning after December 31, 2013” or pay a fine. The new declaration from the Obama administration’s Treasury Department says this part of the law no longer applies. It says employers with between 50 and 99 employees need not provide coverage until 2016 and larger employers need only provide coverage to 70 percent of their employees next year.

◼ Krauthammer: 'This is stuff you do in banana republic' - The Right Scoop VIDEO FROM FOX

◼ CBO Backtracks on Controversial Predictions - National Journal
◼ FIT: Gym members forced to pay new tax - FOX NY
◼ 'Avalanche' of Regs Still to Come: 28 paperwork rules will cost $1.4 billion a year to comply with - Washington Free Beacon



◼ OBAMA: 'I Can Do Whatever I Want' - Weekly Standard

BUT WAIT! THERES'S MORE!

◼ Shock: Hidden In WH Employer Mandate Deal – Employers Not Allowed To Fire Anyone (Video) - Nice Deb

On Monday night’s Kelly File, Megyn Kelly covered the ObamaCare Employer Mandate delay, focusing “on one little nugget” that was “found under a mountain of new regulations” which stipulates that in order to be eligible for this latest this gift from the White House, “the employer may not reduce the size of its workforce or its overall hours of service of its employees.”

“Basically”, she continued, “what the government is telling employers is that you will not fire a single person. You will not lay off a single person – if you want to take advantage of our gift. ...