http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579375310934336066?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_opinion&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303650204579375310934336066.html%3Fmod%3DWSJ_hpp_sections_opinion'ObamaCare" is useful shorthand for the Affordable Care Act not least because the law increasingly means whatever President Obama says it does on any given day. His latest
lawless rewrite arrived on Monday as the White House decided to delay the law's employer mandate for another year and in some cases maybe forever.
ObamaCare requires businesses with 50 or more workers to offer health insurance to their workers or pay a penalty, but last summer the
Treasury offered a year-long delay until 2015 despite having no statutory authorization. Like the individual mandate, the employer decree is central to ObamaCare's claim of universal coverage, but
employers said the new labor costs—and the onerous reporting and tax-enforcement rules—would damage job creation and the economy.
Liberals insisted that such arguments were false if not beneath contempt,
but then all of a sudden the White House implicitly endorsed the other side. Now the new delay arrives amid a furious debate about jobs after a damning Congressional Budget Office report last week,
only this time with liberals celebrating ObamaCare's supposed benefits to the job market.
Well, which is it? Either ObamaCare is ushering in a worker's paradise, in which case by the White House's own logic exempting businesses from its ministrations is harming employees. Or else the mandate really is leading business to cut back on hiring, hours and shifting workers to part-time as the evidence in the real economy suggests.
