Another Obamacare Delay Announced

Yet another Obamacare provision has been delayed for one year.

Several provisions of the Affordable Care Act — notably the employer mandate — have already been put on hold.

In this case, it is the cap on out-of-pocket expenses imposed by the law. The one-size-fits-all Affordable Care Act generally prohibits high-deductible plans and puts a limit on deductibles and co-pays at $6,350 for individuals and $12,700 for families. That limitation, however, has been postponed until 2015. In the interim, insurers are free to continue to set their own co-pays and deductibles

This so-called grace period is good news for insurance companies and not so good news for consumers with big medical bills and/or chronic diseases. However, in the bigger picture, anyone who prefers a high-deductible plan through an employer or purchased directly will forced to obtain additional, unwanted coverage in 2015 and therefore have to pay higher premiums.

With good reason, the ordinary consumer is no fan of insurance companies, whether you like Obamacare or not (and most people don’t, according to opinion polls). That being said, according to Forbes, “Obamacare contains a blizzard of mandates and regulations that will make health insurance more costly… There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you ban lifetime limits, and mandate lower deductibles, and cap out-of-pocket costs, premiums have to go up to reflect these changes. And unlike a lot of the ‘rate shock’ problems we’ve been discussing, these limits apply not only to individually-purchased health insurance, but also to employer-sponsored coverage.

The New York Times reported yesterday that the announcement, as it were, of this particular delay was “outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed.”

According to an unnamed Obama administration source, it’s a computer issue: “We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health plan sponsors and carriers, which told us that their computer systems were not set up to aggregate all of a person’s out-of-pocket costs. They asked for more time to comply.”

The constitutionality of enforcing some provisions of Obamacare and not others is highly questionable, however. US Sen Rand Paul said today that “The president doesn’t get to write legislation, and it’s illegal and unconstitutional for him to try and change legislation by himself.”

In the meantime, the healthcare exchanges or marketplaces that are supposed to go live on October 1 are way behind schedule. According to some observers, the federal online data hub that the exchanges are supposed to feed into is believed to have inadequate privacy protections, making identify theft and fraud more likely.

With Democrats controlling both chambers in Congress at the time, the US Senate passed Obamacare on a straight party-line vote on Christmas Eve 2009. The House of Representatives narrowly passed the Senate version of Obamacare on March 21, 2010.

Do you think Obamacare will ever be fully implemented? Do you believe the endgame is actually a single-payer heathcare system?