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Heritage
Foundation
Delaying
Obamacare's Individual Mandate Due to 'Hardship' -- Caused by
Obamacare
Amy
Payne
March
13, 2014
It’s
getting difficult to take any part of Obamacare seriously.
The
Obama administration has altered or delayed it so many times—who
can be sure what the law is at this point?
The
individual mandate stating that every American has to purchase
government-approved health coverage or pay a fine is supposed to kick
in on March 31. That’s the deadline to sign up for coverage,
supposedly to avoid this year’s penalty.
But
Obamacare is never “settled law,” as the president and others
have called it, because Health and Human Services (HHS) keeps writing
more regulations.
Most
recently, the administration extended the “hardship exemption”
from the individual mandate for those who had their previous policies
canceled because of Obamacare until October 2016.
To
qualify, your plan must have been canceled because it wasn’t
compliant with Obamacare, and you just have to tell the government
you “believe” that other insurance policies are unaffordable.
The
exemption means people who meet these criteria are free from the
individual mandate. But if they want to buy coverage, they are given
the special option to buy a “catastrophic” health insurance plan,
which is not eligible for subsidies and typically would be available
only to those under age 30.
When
the exemption was first announced in December, Heritage experts
Alyene Senger and Robert Moffit said this “is not going to simplify
anything. Rest assured it is going to create even greater confusion
for health insurers trying to sell these products. Also, don’t
expect the unhappy consumers who’ve just lost their previous
coverage to understand clearly which plan they can pick and be
legally qualified to pick it.”
Due
to the utter confusion and the underperforming signups on
HealthCare.gov, reporters asked HHS this week whether the agency
would simply extend the deadline for people to buy coverage. An HHS
official responded that, “In fact, we don’t actually have the
statutory authority to extend the open enrollment period in 2014.”
This
administration hasn’t let a detail like legal authority stop it
from overstepping its bounds multiple times. And as Heritage’s
Senger and Moffit put it, “issuing more government rules to correct
the consequences of their unworkable government rules is the only
thing they seem to know how to do.”
Read
this and other articles with links at Heritage Foundation
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