Obamacare’s individual
mandate—the law’s requirement to purchase health
insurance—won’t be delayed.
Following growing chatter that the administration might put a
hold on the mandate, which remains one of the health law’s least
popular provisions, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius
said in congressional testimony yesterday that the
administration would under no circumstances delay the requirement.
Nor would federal officials be extending this year’s open
enrollment period for buying coverage under the law, which is
currently set to end on March 31.
But here’s the thing: the mandate is already essentially moot
for just about anyone who wants it to be. That’s because the law
allows for a “hardship exemption”—an exemption that the
administration has extended and expanded in the wake of the
disastrous rollout of the exchanges.
Last December, the administration
clarified the hardship exemption to include people whose plans
had been canceled thanks to the health law, and were “having
difficulty finding an acceptable replacement.” To translate: You
could get a waiver if new plans available under Obamacare were
either too skimpy or too expensive. Exempted individuals would be
allowed to buy into cheaper “catastrophic” plans that had been
limited to individuals under 30, or to carry no coverage at
all.
That weakened the mandate. An update to the exemption rendered
it nearly useless. Earlier this week, The Wall Street
Journal’s editorial page
noted that the hardship exemption had quietly been extended
through 2016, and that the verification required to obtain the
exemption was less than strict:
But amid the post-rollout political backlash, last week the
agency created a new category: Now all you need to do is fill out a
form attesting that your plan was cancelled and that you “believe
that the plan options available in the [ObamaCare] Marketplace in
your area are more expensive than your cancelled health insurance
policy” or “you consider other available policies
unaffordable.”This lax standard—no formula or hard test beyond a person’s
belief—at least ostensibly requires proof such as an insurer
termination notice. But people can also qualify for hardships for
the unspecified nonreason that “you experienced another hardship in
obtaining health insurance,” which only requires “documentation if
possible.” And yet another waiver is available to those who say
they are merely unable to afford coverage, regardless of their
prior insurance. In a word, these shifting legal benchmarks offer
an exemption to everyone who conceivably wants one.
So, the White House isn’t officially delaying the mandate.
Instead, the administration is declining to enforce it on anyone
who asks to be exempt.
In some sense, it’s like used car pricing, or cable company
discounts. Officially, the price is what’s on the sticker. But if
you make even a token effort to bargain, or half-heartedly threaten
to cancel service, you can get the price lowered.
Mostly, it’s a mechanism that allows the administration to have
it both ways: Of course the mandate is absolutely
essential to the law, and of course practically anyone who
wants out of it can get an exemption on a hardship basis. But that
approach also reveals the tough spot administration officials are
in with regards to the mandate: They don’t want to remove the
requirement, but they don’t really want to enforce it
either.
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