With the serious setbacks facing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, it is starting to look like it would be best for opponents of the law to wait for the disaster to unfold to reap the political benefits of its collapse in 2014.
But, as I argue in a column at The Weekly Standard, pushing for delaying the individual mandate should remain a key part of the GOP’s opposition to the law in the months ahead.
There are many conservatives who fully expect the law to collapse under its own immense weight, and who anticipate that they will reap the political benefits of that collapse in 2014 no matter what they do now. So why engage in another politically risky showdown with the president?
Certainly the GOP shouldn’t repeat the mistaken tactics of the last month. But there’s every reason to continue making a delay of the individual mandate the GOP’s top priority in the negotiations with the Obama administration and Senate Democrats over the coming months.
For one thing, there will never be a better time to press the case for a mandate delay. The rollout of Obamacare is a complete mess. The voters can see for themselves that enrollment in Obamacare is a completely unreasonable proposition at this stage, even with the administration’s recent announcement that it will treat any enrollment commitments made before April 1 as satisfying the coverage requirement (previously, the cut-off to avoid the uninsured tax was thought to be mid-February, because the law allows for three months without coverage in a calendar year and it can take several weeks to go from an enrollment submission to initiation of insurance coverage). It should be obvious that the system for determining subsidy amounts for households has not been tested nearly enough to ensure it is reliable and will not waste billions in taxpayer dollars. It will be impossible for the administration to continue its defense of the individual mandate if these conditions remain substantially unchanged through the end of 2013.
You can read the rest of the column here.