Free Republic

Old and busted: Businesses will love ObamaCare for its cost savings in health care! New hotness: Businesses had better not make staffing decisions based on cost savings from ObamaCare-fueled price spikes! After its latest delay in implementing the employer mandate, the Obama administration rebuffed criticisms that the law incentivizes employers to shift to part-time work by announcing the Treasury Inquisition — ahem, excuse me, the Treasury Attestation Department: The latest announcement comes after the administration heard from businesses about their concerns with the looming ObamaCare rules. However, the change is sure to raise more questions about the health and implementation...

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, there´s so much going on out there. The lawlessness of this Regime knows no bounds. There´s nothing stopping this man from doing anything. If he wants to raise marginal tax rates, he can just do it. Nobody´s gonna stop him. Here is the latest. As you know, the Regime recently delayed the implementation of the employer mandate for three years, until 2016. This means that employers who have a hundred or less employees will be subject to the mandate. (Snip) I mean, this is absolutely lawless. It is against the law. They cannot, ladies and gentlemen,

(CNSNews.com) – Once again acting without Congress, President Obama has unilaterally changed his signature health insurance law, delaying its employer mandate – the second time he’s done this -- to 2016, after the mid-term elections. BUT: To be eligible for the additional delay, the Obama administration says an employer “may not reduce the size of its workforce or the overall hours of service of its employees” unless it can justify those reductions to the Internal Revenue Service. On Monday, the administration issued new regulations saying that employers with 50 to 99 workers don’t need to provide minimum essential coverage until...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration will phase in a requirement that large employers provide their workers with health benefits in 2015 and 2016, offering businesses more relief from the so-called employer mandate in the president’s health law. Under regulations issued Monday, only employers with more than 100 full-time workers will be subject to fines in 2015 unless they offer coverage. The requirement that all employers with more than 50 full-time employees provide health benefits or pay fines – which was supposed to begin in 2014 under the Affordable Care Act – will not take effect until 2016. snip

While Washington debates over what is the proper explanation of the CBO's report which explicitly states that millions of workers will drop out of the labor force over the next decade thanks to Obamacare, Obama himself may have finally thrown in the towel, realizing that the longer the full implementation of Obamacare is delayed, the longer the myth that it is a viable Ponzi scheme - as opposed to non-viable - can persist. Perhaps this explains why AP reports that the White House is now considering an extension of the president's decision to let people keep their individual insurance policies...

This may be considered old news, but I'm just now getting to it because I've been under the weather for a couple of days. Nothing like a stomach bug to take the wind out of your sails.By now, anyone who is paying attention knows President Obama has exercised the authority he does not have and delayed the ObamaCare employer mandate, yet again. If you are keeping track, I have lost count of the number of times he has changed or delayed the law and its rocky implementation, seemingly all at his political whim. Not only has he delayed the employer...

As the country's first 'Imperial President' threatens to rule by Executive fiat and just simply run-over the Republicans' feckless leadership, he's also made clear he intends to continue ongoing, previous strategies (lie, obfuscate, and withhold) he's utilized thus far. The latest example of unconstitutional+underhanded mischief from the habitually-dishonest Obama was unearthed by Megyn Kelly on Fox Monday night, when in the course of researching the ObamaCare Employer Mandate delay they found 'on one little nugget... found under a mountain of new regulations': any employer who dare “reduce the size of its workforce or its overall hours of service of its employees' will...

This week, another major U.S. retailer—Target—announced that it will be cutting health coverage for its part-time workers in response to changes stemming from the president’s health care law. The Minneapolis-based company now joins the likes of Home Depot and Trader Joes, among others, that have decided to dump part-time employee coverage to save on health care costs.

In 2014, 25 million to 30 million Americans who have employer-provided health insurance are likely to lose it thanks to Obamacare’s requirement that all plans cover what Washington deems “essential benefits.” Some employers will consider that unaffordable and drop coverage altogether, when their current, lower cost plans expire over the course of the year. These 25 to 30 million are in addition to 6 million who bought plans in the individual market and had them cancelled by January 1. The plight of those 6 million made headline news and caused the first cracks in the Democratic Party’s support for the...

Sen. Ted Cruz plans to argue Monday in a legal memo that Obamacare is unconstitutional and an abuse of federal authority, according to The Daily Caller. His memorandum, "The Legal Limit: The Obama Administration's Attempts to Expand Federal Power," will reportedly include legal citations and argues that the Obama administration's implementation of its signature healthcare legislation demonstrates an "abusive view of federal power." According to the Daily Caller, the Texas Republican and tea party favorite uses the memo to question the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling upholding the law by noting that parts of it were found not to meet the...

Even as President Barack Obama sold a new health care law in part by assuring Americans they would be able to keep their insurance plans, his administration knew that tens of millions of people actually could lose those their policies. “If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep your plan. Period,” Obama said as he pitched the plan, the unqualified promise he made repeatedly. Yet advisers did say in 2010 that there were large caveats and that anyone whose insurance plan changed would lose the promised protection of being able to keep existing plans. And a report...

Here's an opportunity to get ahead of events and hand the Republicans some free advice. My question for you all is this. What made the employers work out a delay of their employer mandate? Is there another mass dump of insureds about to happen. Do the Republicans have a media response to any new disruptions that could be anticipated.

Let's start with the very basics here. About 15 million people purchase health insurance policies on the individual market. That's about 5 percent of the population. Some -- or maybe even most -- of the plans offered on the individual insurance market right now don't meet certain requirements in the health-care law. They may not offer preventive care without co-payment, for example, or leave out coverage of maternity care, one of the health-care law's 10 essential benefits. How many people are going to get cancellation notices? It's hard to put an exact number on this, given that insurance plans are...

Who’s got trouble? We got trouble. How MUCH trouble? TOO much trouble! And it’s not going to get any better for Affordable Care Act groupies as the road to October 1st is paved with too many disasters for the "good intentions" to have any effect. Deep blue, scrupulously liberal Colorado quickly signed up to invest its own residents money in Barack’s healthcare boondoggle and what state officials have reaped for their toil and investment may well mirror the success of the ACA in the rest of the nation–at least in a hopey, changey sort of way. First off, the multi-million...

The Obama administration suffered a telling and potentially far-reaching defeat in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this week on the need for the executive branch to abide by statutory law. While the issue at the center of the case involved an old and somewhat arcane controversy over nuclear waste, the implications may well alter the political calculus on immigration, drug policy and especially the rollout of Obamacare. THE BACKGROUND The appellate court ruled on a lawsuit arising over the White House’s refusal to complete the certification of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a nuclear-waste site.  Yucca Mountain has been...

The Obama administration’s one year delay of the employer mandate may strengthen two cases challenging parts of President Obama’s law.The two cases, Halbig v. Sebelius and Pruitt v. Sebelius, take different approaches to challenging the Obama IRS in its decision to allow subsidies in states with federal exchanges. The IRS decision, unsupported by the legislative language, is estimated to cost $800 billion over ten years.The Halbig plaintiffs are a group of individuals and small and medium-sized businesses suing to avoid the premium subsidies, penalties, and compliance costs. The plaintiff in Pruitt v. Sebelius is the State of Oklahoma, which chose...

Via Byron York, an amazing bit buried in the NYT’s interview with The One after his economy-speech snooze last week. This is as close as you’ll ever get to seeing a pol answer a reporter’s question with “because I said so”: ... Evidently if Congress doesn’t do what he wants, he enjoys legal authority under the Doin’ Good For The People Clause of the Constitution to do it himself. That’s not the first time he’s invoked that clause either; remember, he decided to continue his intervention in Libya even though his own lawyers concluded that he had no power to...

If Nixon had tried something like this, he would have rightly been branded a “rogue president.” Jackie Calmes, a first-class political reporter working for the New York Times, actually had the gall to ask the president if he had consulted White House lawyers on the constitutionality of unilaterally delaying the employer mandate in Obamacare. Obama’s answer would have been worthy of King George, or perhaps a meglomaniacal dictator — not a servant of the people in a great republic.

<p>The Obamacare disaster is coming. Sure, the president is delaying or dismissing parts of it because they’ve proved either unmanageable or unworkable in the legally allotted time to set them up, but the most invasive and damaging aspects are still coming. But there is a chance to stop them in their tracks, IF Republicans have the courage to do it.</p>

President Obama is threatening to veto Republican bills that would delay the healthcare reform law's employer and individual mandates. Obama declared the employer bill "unnecessary" — the administration announced the same delay on July 2 — and said the individual bill is harmful to consumers in a Statement of Administration Policy issued Tuesday.