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Obamacare delay: Why not repeal?

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Are there any devils left in hell? Or did Obama hire them all away?

Two days ago, the Barack Obama administration decided to delay the new “Business Mandate” part of Obamacare. But Obama has no authority to do this. And Congress could best serve the people by repealing this law outright.

What exactly did the administration do?

The Obamacare law (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) scheduled two unfunded mandates for New Year’s Day, 2014. The Individual or Minimum Coverage mandate says all persons must have health insurance to cover anything that could happen to anyone, or pay a federal fine (tax?). That applies whether any person is truly at risk for expensive chronic illnesses, or not. (For everyone’s information, one need not get sick. Joseph R. Mercola, DO, has said that for years.) The Employer or Business mandate says all businesses, who employ 50 people or more, must offer this same coverage-of-everything as a group plan, or pay their own fines.

The Associated Press reports the bare facts: on Tuesday evening (July 2), Mark Mazur, Assistant Treasury Secretary, said the government would put off the Business Mandate for a year.

We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively….We have listened to your feedback and we are taking action.

What, exactly, Mark Mazur heard, he didn’t say. He might have heard this: that businesses all over the country were finding ways to keep their payrolls under fifty. That meant:

  • Declining to expand when they had the chance.
  • Replacing full-time staff with part-time staff. (Incidentally: under Obamacare, “full-time” means thirty hours or more per week.)
  • Openly sharing staff with other firms, even competitors.

Today, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board shared the bloody, gory details. It also reported the new name for companies that avoid hiring their fiftieth employee: the “Forty-niners.”

But the Individual Mandate stays in place. And the WSJ editors noticed this: any person, whose employer won’t offer the cover-everything policy, qualifies to get a government check to help him buy a policy like that. Maybe. Businesses don’t even have to tell the government for another year whether they will offer these policies or not. How is the government to know, then, who qualifies, and who doesn’t? And where does a person go to buy these new policies? The insurance “exchanges,” where people were supposed to go, are not ready.

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Does the Obamacare law allow this?

Barack Obama delays Obamacare mandate

Barack Obama, in multicolored shadow, imitating Lenin or Stalin. Artist unknown.

The Obamacare law says nothing about letting the President, or any other civil officer, delay any part of this law. A court might delay a new law. A President may not.

Incredibly, the WSJ editors now this – and then suggest Republicans give him that authority, “in return for other concessions.”

In addition to forcing votes on suspending the individual mandate-tax, this could include repealing the medical device tax and other harmful provisions. Democrats will find it hard to defend an individual mandate-tax now that businesses are spared. And a delay of one year can easily become two, then three, and then past the next Presidential election.

Excuse me? Why waste time on taking down bits and pieces of Obamacare? It is already unconstitutional, and for many more reasons than the Individual and Business Mandates. Has everyone forgotten:

  • Obamacare, being a tax bill, came out of the Senate, not the House. (Remember: Chief Justice Roberts called it a tax.)
  • The Obamacare tax works like a capitation tax. Even the Sixteenth Amendment did not let Congress lay that kind of tax without apportioning it among the States.
  • Obamacare raises a new armed force – the Ready Reserve Health Corps – with a four-year appropriation. Under the Constitution, Congress may raise armies, but may not do so for more than two years at a time.

Add to it: Barack Obama shouldn’t sign anything into law. We don’t even know who his father is. The man he claimed as his father was a British colonial subject.

Some who understand what Obamacare does

John Boehner, R-Ohio, Speaker of the House, understands what just happened. Todd Beamon at Newsmax quotes him:

The president’s healthcare law is already raising costs and costing jobs….This announcement means even the Obama administration knows the ‘train wreck’ will only get worse….I hope the administration recognizes the need to release American families from the mandates of this law as well….This is a clear acknowledgment that the law is unworkable, and it underscores the need to repeal the law and replace it with effective, patient-centered reforms.

All right, Mr. Speaker. What are you going to do about it? You could make this go away in a trice, and you know it. The Presidential Succession Act of 1947, as amended, says if we do not have either President or Vice-President, you’re next in line. So why won’t you review the findings of, for example, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, that this de facto President has never shown himself eligible to the office he holds? If morality does not impel you, surely ambition would? Or have the PRISMatic cats got your tongue?

Everyone knows why Obama did this. If that Business Mandate goes into force and effect, everyone will know it, and everyone will face a day without health insurance (or having to pay twice as much for it). So Obama now seeks to delay the pain until after the 2014 elections.

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Except that he forgot to waive the Individual Mandate. And that will take full force and effect, unless something else changes. The IRS will assume anyone who works at a business that “hasn’t reported in,” is not “covered,” and is liable for a fine. And if they don’t, discerning voters will see through that as clearly as looking through an ultra-clean window.

Once again, all eyes are on the Senate. And one State (New Jersey) has a special Senate election coming up, in October. And at least one candidate, Alieta Eck, got into that Senate race precisely on account of Obamacare. The day before Mr. Mazur announced the delay, she pledged to vote to repeal Obamacare. And after Mr. Mazur said what he did, she reminded everybody of the obvious:

By delaying this key provision, the White House is clearly beginning to realize what we have all known was true – that ObamaCare will be a job-killer and an unbearable burden on American small businesses.

Unbearable, and unconstitutional. And now Obama uses totally unconstitutional means to get around its problems. But the Business Mandate is only one problem. It’s time to repeal Obamacare.

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Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.

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