Executive Power Grab Revisited

When the President decided to no longer actively support the Federal laws governing same sex marriage, it was honestly received with a certain degree of boredom by the American voters. People have grown so collectively tired of the argument over what marriage legally is that most are to the point that they do not care if people marry anything. The reality that state laws and court challenges will sooner, rather than later result in same sex marriages for all interested parties means there is no longer any political imperative for the government to bother with defending the Defens of Marriage Act at the Federal level.

Its a waste of both money and time.

The issue of dropping immigration laws by the stroke of a pen has already been covered here in an earlier post. If it was a case of the President willingly ignoring laws he was under oath to support when it came to these laws, what conclusions should be drawn regarding the Affordable Care Act?

Whether we needed wholesale reform of the medical care system in the United States is a separate issue. We had anywhere from 7-15 million uninsured people. Uninsured people accessing the healthcare system was a serious problem. We were told that at the very least, the ACA if passed would go greatly beyond what was needed to solve this primary problem as well as literally hundreds of related problems. So four years later we are finding that the same pre passage level of uninsured remains and may increase to 20 million people. What happened?

The law has had so many changes by executive decree that there is now no longer any reasonable assumption that the actual words of the law have any bearing upon reality. When the law has become politically damaging, it has undergone a protean change. Obama has either through executive order, administrative order, or bureaucratic rule changing effectively sought to either mitigate a failing of the law's implementation or the negative impacts that would accrue to voters if the law was implemented as written. In either case, the President has either sought to not enforce  the law as written or move beyond the intent as it is written to resultantly create an implementation of the law compatible with political priorities.

So the goal line for moving the final deadline for enrolement in the Health Care Exchanges has slipped now to the end of April. It was announced at 10:00 PM Eastern Daylight time. Almost no one will notice the announcement. The reason for this announcement is that the rates in 2015 will be determined by the enrolled individuals from the open enrollment period that the law requires starring January 1st of each year and ending the last day of March.

So far the most optimistic numbers released by the administartion states that 5 million people have gone through the enrollment portal since it opened late last year. The rates were assumed to be based upon 7 million enrolled by the end of the March period. The assumption by the administration had been that likely 12 million would enroll because it was such a good deal and the consumer demand would be there.

The demand has not been there. In fact no one knows for sure how many people who enrolled have paid a premium. Some numbers are coming to light showing that people actually paying for the coverage may not have even reached 2 million people. And that is the true reason for this new delay. If at the end of April, only 7 million have signed up and of that number only half have paid for a premium, the rates the insurer pools will need to be viable will not only force a crippling rate increase for 2015, but will also likely initiate the government backed funding mechanism in the law designed to pay the insurance companies if the available pool of enrollees does not make it statistically possible for them to remain solvent despite inadequate insured pool size.

In other words, the people in 2015 attempting to enroll for insurance in 2016 will be seeing even greater  sticker shock for quoted premiums. The average person this year saw a 44% increase in his premium regardless of who is providing coverage for him. How angry will people be with yet another double digit percentage increase in 2015? Never mind the issue of just how much more expensive the law has been compared to what we were promised.

What this latest delay is, is simply a last gambit to forestall a major sticker shock revolt by voters leading up to the 2016 election. If the enrollment remains low, resulting in increased premiums in 2015 and 2016 Obama will likely see a total collapse of the Democrat Party but also healthcare in the country as well.

The fact the President is not enforcing the law but instead is treating it as a Constitutional Tar Baby is telling.