Dr. Milton Wolf uses a Washington Times column to deliver his prognosis of ObamaCare’s political future.
Now a central tenet of the fundamentally flawed law, the employer mandate, is collapsing. What ever will Democrats do?
In a word: panic.
Actually, panic and break the law. The unambiguous start date for Obamacare’s employer mandate, according to Section 1513, is the “months beginning after Dec. 31, 2013.” With the delay, however, President Obama has declared that he is not bound by mere law. All he is missing are mirrored sunglasses and a big military hat.
Obamacare’s employer mandate is a microcosm of liberalism itself. What may sound good at first ends up harming the most vulnerable among us. Businesses that dare to provide jobs to 50 or more employees face steep fines unless they provide expensive government-sanctioned health insurance. Because Obamacare now defines 30 hours a week to be full time, the result is entirely predictable: Businesses are laying off workers and cutting back work hours.
Witness the rise of the Obamacare “Forty-Niners.” No, this is not some Keystone Kops version of a San Francisco football team. The Forty-Niners in the age of Obama is the class of struggling small businesses forced to keep their payroll below 50 full-time employees or face the Democrats’ wrath. If you are the 50th employee, good luck keeping your job.
Panicked Democrats are eager to avoid the spectacle of Obamacare layoffs during an election year. They couldn’t care less about the layoffs themselves or the families caught in the cross hairs, mind you. Otherwise, they would repeal the employer mandate altogether rather than simply delay it. The Democrats’ desperate political gambit won’t work, though, because the Obamacare layoffs already have begun and the backfire is about to begin.
