Posted on 09/26/2013 11:36:07 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Two words, my friends: “Bipartisan support.”
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia broke ranks with fellow Democrats and said he’d support a stopgap spending plan that delays the individual mandate in President Barack Obama’s health-care law.
“There’s no way I could not vote for it,” Manchin said at a Bloomberg Government breakfast today. “It’s very reasonable and sensible.”…
Manchin, 66, said he’d be willing to delay the individual mandate as part of the budget negotiations because the Obama administration in July gave businesses an extra year to provide their workers with health insurance.
“Don’t put the mandate on the American public right now,” Manchin said. “Give them at least a year. If you know you couldn’t bring the corporate sector, you gave them a year, don’t you think it’d be fair?”
Two intriguing footnotes. One: News of this broke while The One was busy delivering his umpteen-thousandth speech about how terrific O-Care will be if we just give it a chance. Coincidence, or did Manchin time this for maximum impact? Two: Unlike many other red-state Democrats, he’s not up for reelection next year. He’s safe in West Virginia until 2018. Either he supports delay on the merits (he ran an ad three years ago in which he literally shot a hole through a copy of the bill) or he thinks the political fallout of backing O-Care will be so gruesome that it’ll still be a liability for him in five years. Either way, this is just the sort of political cover that Democrats who are up for reelection in conservative states need to vote with the GOP. Pryor, Landrieu, Begich, Hagan — Republicans could conceivably have 50 votes or more for delay headed into debt-ceiling negotiations. That won’t break a filibuster but it does complicate the White House’s message of blaming everything on those darned wingnuts and their anti-ObamaCare monomania.
But Manchin’s announcement wasn’t the only news breaking during O’s speech:
The Obama administration is delaying another piece of Obamacare – this time postponing online enrollment in some of the small-business exchanges scheduled to open Oct. 1, sources tell POLITICO.
Small businesses looking to enroll in coverage on so-called SHOP exchanges run by the federal government will be able to submit a paper application on Oct. 1 – they just won’t be able to enroll online…
The SHOP applications represent the latest glitch in the federal exchange infrastructure. Federal health officials recently said they won’t be able to transfer Medicaid applications to states right away, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week.
So there’s the answer to the question I asked last night. The D.C. exchange was promoted by the media as ahead of the curve relative to other exchanges, and yet they still couldn’t get the subsidies calculations right in time for launch day — with three years to prepare. If that’s the shape that a comparatively well-run exchange was in, when would the more poorly-run exchanges start postponing elements of the rollout? Well, here you go. It took less than 24 hours.
Exit question: At this point, would the White House rather meet Boehner’s demand for a one-year delay of all of ObamaCare or Manchin’s demand for a one-year delay of the individual mandate specifically? I think there’s more political risk to the latter than the former, no? If you delay the whole law, you buy yourself time to work out all the bugs before trying again at a rollout next year. It’ll be hugely embarrassing to the White House to postpone things when they’re this close to launch, and there are doubtless lots of congressional Democrats who don’t want O-Care becoming a key issue right before the midterms, but that’s survivable. What’s potentially not survivable is rolling out the exchanges now minus the individual mandate, which means lots of young adults will face no legal compulsion to buy in. If (as Bill Clinton noted two days ago) healthy uninsured people refuse to fork over their money, then insurers suddenly don’t have a pool of revenue to cover all the people with preexisting conditions who are signing up, and then the whole scheme starts to collapse. There’ll be no delays after that; if insurers start crumbling, we’ll be in post-ObamaCare mode as a country. Better, then, to hit pause on the whole thing if you’re O to prevent that sort of collapse, right?
Yes, but the GOP will get control in 2014 and then we can really start taking it apart.
I’m convinced that the very worst thing for the Team Donkey is to let this obamanation proceed to full implementation. Why the GOP would want to give the Donks another year before people feel the pain is totally weird to me.
I salute Cruz’s filibuster. He did an excellent thing to put an exclamation point on GOP opposition to Obamacare. Now let it go into effect. Let America have it “good and strong” as the saying goes.
The way forward is through the fire, in my opinion.
Delaying RINOcare ensures its ultimate survival.
I just can’t get my arms around the concept of paying a tax for not purchasing something. What’s next? A tax for not buying a “green” car? A tax for not having a windmill? A tax for not buying brocolli?
GOP stupidity once again on lurid display.
We should stop ObamaCare completely, or do nothing!
Postponing implementation just helps the Democrats to install ObamaCare piece by piece.
If we are too frightened to shut down the government, then our best political weapon in 2014 is the outrage that millions of voters will feel when they directly experience ObamaCare.
Instead, our leaders now want to campaign on the “theoretical” possibility that the individual mandate will be a really, really bad thing.
Can you imagine what the MSM and the Democrats will do to that argument if we give them a 12 month reprieve?
Our leadership is so weak and so stupid.
Could be he’s already getting negative feedback from his home district. However, if he falters, he will get a call from the top dogs in the dem party, telling him that he has to vote their way, and if he gets kicked out of office they’ll give him a high paying no-work job at the taxpayers’ expense.
I made a similar argument on another thread. If you can't kill it, let the public choke on ObamaCare. They will be sure to remember in 2014. Delaying implementation only helps the Democrats.
Exactly. We must submit to anything the Goverment wants or pay a tax.
But you can get tax deductions and credits for buying a green car and other stuff. So I'm not quite sure how you draw the legal line between buying a green car and deducting the purchase off your taxes vs. not buying health insurance and paying a tax because of it.
The law is going to subsidize health insurance for a lot of people. That’s why the costs of everyone currently insured is going way up. It’s always been just another redistributive welfare program. And once those takers start taking, there’s no question in my mind support for the law will go up, and the takers will continue voting for the politicians who are paying them off with bennies.
Just pass an amendment that explains “Congress, Unions and selected businesses have been exempted from Obamacare, there fore ALL United States citizens are heretofore similarily exempted.” Carry on.
We also need to emphasize to potential ObamaCare customers that the experiment’s days are numbered. Fewer will want to play if they realize that it’s only a temporary program, and that will help us to kill that terrible and evil law.
I don't agree with them either. Nor do I agree with government funding "green" industries etc. Let these products or services be viable or go out of business.
I agree with you, but Roberts could only overturn it if it was unconstitutional, not just because he didn’t agree with it. And I’m just not sure it was a slam dunk to call it unconstitutional based on the games our government regularly gets away with through the tax code.
Really...
Perhaps you can give me the results of the 5th at Belmont tomorrow.
“Yes,but the GOP will get control in 2014 and then we can really start taking it apart”
At the rate the GOP is going there won’t be anybody that would vote for Republicans. If you hadn’t noticed, they have been committing political suicide.
Now your catching on.
And THAT is the “coercion”!
Obama lost every county in West Virginia and Manchin votes like he is a Democrat from Colorado.
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