Surprise: #Obamacare individual mandate “quietly” delayed for two more years

Update: Phineas has a much more detailed and thoughtful post on this subject here.

King Obama
Here we go again.
Image via Salon.com

The Wall Street Journal reports on how the latest election-year Obamacare delay and how it was done with little to no fanfare by the White House:

ObamaCare’s implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Actβ€”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 withΒ ObamaCareΒ benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.

That seven-pageΒ technical bulletinΒ includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out thisΒ second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.

In 2013, HHS decided that ObamaCare’s wave of policy terminations qualified as a “hardship” that entitled people to a special type of coverage designed for people under age 30 or a mandate exemption. HHS originally defined and reserved hardship exemptions for the truly down and out such as battered women, the evicted and bankrupts.

But amid the post-rollout political backlash, last week the agency created a new category: Now all you need to do is fill out a form attesting that your plan was cancelled and that you “believe that the plan options available in the [ObamaCare] Marketplace in your area are more expensive than your cancelled health insurance policy” or “you consider other available policies unaffordable.”

[…]

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 areΒ ObamaCareΒ liberals silently gutting their own creation now?

Make sure to read the whole thing to get the full scope of what they did in the quiet of the night with no media notice … and why.

Paging Senator Cruz, paging Senator Cruz …

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