Obamacare is a Snafu for the Ages

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

The White House is spinning its recently announced delay in enforcing Obamacare’s employer mandate as evidence of the administration’s "flexibility" – of its determination that implementation be "done right."

Done right? The huge, unread, never-debated, unfathomable "Affordable Care Act" was signed into law in March, 2010. The administration has had three years and four months to get it right.

Washington Democrats who force-fed Americans an outrage which hijacks one-sixth of the American economy are too incompetent to implement even one of the simpler elements of Obamacare’s suite of atrocities in three times the 410 days it took to erect the Empire State Building!

Simply stated, the administration couldn’t complete the oversight and enforcement mechanisms for employers’ insurance reporting by the legislated 2014 deadline – nearly four years after Obamacare’s enactment.

This announcement is significant, because the progress of implementation has been so opaque that only the administration knows its status. Progress on federally-run Obamacare individual mandate exchanges, including one for Pennsylvania, remains unknown. An investigation by the Government Accountability Office recently concluded that it "cannot yet be determined" if the exchanges will be ready in October as the law requires.

They won’t be.

Unelected administration bureaucrats had time, though, to "enhance" Obamacare by creating more than 19,000 pages of additional regulations which, like the bill itself, few have read and no one understands.

In addition to conceding its incompetence, by delaying the certain pain of employer mandate enforcement beyond the 2014 midterm elections, the administration signaled its intention to manipulate the law for its own political benefit.

Doesn’t the Constitution’s "take care" clause mean anything? Article II, Section 3 of the US Constitution requires that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Obamacare specifies implementation schedules, but contains no provision allowing the administration to ignore them.
Obama’s delay of only one of the law’s mandates is part of a disturbing pattern in which the president alone decides which laws he’ll enforce or ignore. With years to meet the deadlines, the administration’s failure to implement or enforce any provision of Obamacare – including meeting legislated timetables – is a clear violation of federal law.

It’s not the first. The Hill newspaper provided a useful list of ten prior changes, deletions and complications, including removal of 1099 reporting requirements, elimination of the CLASS Act, failure to set up small-business exchanges, more than 1,200 Obamacare waivers for politically favored organizations and multiple legal state refusals to create exchanges.

America’s system of checks and balances was designed to rein in arbitrary and capricious uses of power. Mario Loyola wrote, correctly: "The administration’s refusal to execute duly enacted laws of Congress is a power grab against the most essential constitutional prerogatives of Congress."

By dismissing the Constitution he’s sworn to uphold and defend, Obama’s assumption of executive authority mocks constitutional intent and tradition.
Still, President Obama’s assumption that he’s above the law is less disturbing than that, dictatorially, he appears to think he is the law.

Congress passed the monstrosity. If Obamacare’s provisions and deadlines were too confusing, onerous or unreasonable, rather than acting unilaterally, why didn’t the president approach Congress for legal legislative remedies?

Private-sector executives, like those at Enron and Tyco, are held personally responsible for company violations of federal law. As chief executive, isn’t it equally criminal for Obama to ignore provisions of the law or fail to meet them?
As reported by the GAO, the Obama administration also appears to have failed to properly plan for the exchanges meant to provide insurance choices for consumers. If the employer mandate is delayed, on what legal basis does the administration discriminate against individuals and families by leaving in place Obamacare’s individual mandate, a far larger and more complex feature?
After four years, if central provisions of the bill remain incomplete or unworkable, what evidence suggests that Obamacare will become more viable, workable or popular by 2015 — or 2017?

The collapse of the employer mandate belies the president’s assurances that the federal government – more specifically, his administration – has the qualifications to manage health care for more than 300 million Americans.
The administration’s and Obamacare’s inadequacies may prove fatal.

In fact, Wes Pruden conducted a sardonically amusing anticipatory post-mortem on Obamacare’s mounting failures: "The editors of The New York Times, Mr. Obama’s most reliable sycophants, are deep in mourning, but working furiously to apply more rouge to the corpse before it turns the parlor too fragrant for a wake. It’s summer, and they’re running out of ice."

The stink of death has been on Obamacare since passage. Only the olfactory-challenged and stubborn ideologues failed to notice.