Democrat Manchin Breaks Ranks to Back Mandate Delay

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Bloomberg:

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.”

The individual mandate is the linchpin of the law that requires most Americans to purchase health care through government-run insurance exchanges. Republicans, led by a group of newcomers in the House, are pushing to dismantle the health-care law and are using a ticking clock on a possible Oct. 1 government shutdown as leverage.

The Democratic-led Senate will vote in coming days on the stopgap spending plan and before sending it back to the House will remove language that defunds Obamacare. Obama and House Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, have said they won’t support using the budget to change the health law.

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.

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Looking for a way out.

[Valin]

@WestVirginaRebel

 

Fresh Obamacare Delay Could Be Sign of Things to Come

9/26/13

 

Different provisions of Obamacare has been delayed in many ways in the last several months, most notably the employer mandate. By putting off the implementation of some important but vexing parts of the law, the administration presumably hoped to make the launch as smooth as possible. Once the basic infrastructure of exchanges and subsidies was in place, then more controversial parts of the law could be tackled, or so the thinking was.

 

But delay is piling up on delay as we approach the October 1 deadline. And the nation’s capital is the site of the newest implementation snafu. Wonkblog:

 

While the D.C. Health Link will launch a Web site on October 1, shoppers will not have access to the their premium prices until mid-November. The delay comes after the District marketplace discovered “a high error rate” in calculating the tax credits that low- and middle-income people will use to purchase insurance on the marketplace.

 

The insurance marketplaces, if working as planned, are supposed to spit out an estimate for a tax credit after a shopper enters in some basic information about where she lives and how much she earns. In the District, that won’t happen next month. Instead, the eligibility determination will be made “off-line by experts” by early November.

Given that DC started setting up its exchange earlier than most, this may be a sign that similar problems will be cropping up in the states before long........(Snip)