White House Drafts Employers to Spin Obamacare

The
Obama administration’s
announcement this week that it was delaying Obamacare’s
employer mandate for businesses with between 50 and 99 employees
for an additional year included a catch: Any small business that
wanted to take advantage of the delay would be
required to certify to the Internal Revenue Service, under
penalty of perjury, that no positions had been terminated in order
to qualify for the exemption.

“It’s simply so they don’t game the system,” a senior
administration official
told reporters when the requirement was announced.

That’s one way to put it. Another would be that it’s a way for
the administration to give itself political cover. Still another
would be that it’s an implicit admission on the part of the
administration that its rules create an incentive for employers
near the 100-employee threshold to cut jobs.

The political reasoning behind the requirement is obvious. If
anyone argues that the regulations surrounding the employer mandate
cost jobs, the Obama administration can point to a stack of
self-attestations in which employers say that the revised
regulations did not cause them to terminate hours or positions. Yet
the impulse to require employers to assert that Obamacare is not to
blame seems to stem from the understanding that, in at least some
cases, the rules do create an incentive to cut jobs in order to
avoid the law’s employer-coverage requirement for an additional
year.

Basically, the Obama administration is creating a mechanism by
which employers will be encouraged to spin for the White House. And
it’s not the first time something like that has happened. Health
insurers
were required to inform customers getting rebates as a result
of Obamacare’s medical-loss ratio rule that the health law was to
credit (without, of course, mentioning the ways that the MLR rule
created incentives to drive premiums higher). You expect the White
House to hard sell its own policies, but the Obama administration
seems to think it needs to co-opt businesses into doing the
same.