Robert Gibbs’ prediction that Obamacare’s employer mandate would — and perhaps should — be jettisoned shocked Democrats back in April.
By July, the former aide and longtime confidant of President Barack Obama had a lot more company. More and more liberal activists and policy experts who help shape Democratic thinking on health care have concluded that penalizing businesses if they don’t offer health insurance is an unnecessary element of the Affordable Care Act that may do more harm than good. Among them are experts at the Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund and prominent academics like legal scholar Tim Jost.
The employer mandate, Jost wrote in a Health Affairs post in June, “cries out for repair.” Repealing it “might not be such a bad idea,” if it’s replaced with something better for workers and businesses.
Leading Democrats in Congress aren’t bolting from the employer mandate, at least not before the November election. But the White House has delayed it twice in the past year, dubbed it “not critical” and said it will be phased in more slowly when its begins next year.
The rule that businesses with more than 50 full-time workers offer them affordable health insurance has been a political headache from the start. The nonstop stream of headlines, however anecdotal, about businesses cutting jobs or shortening workweeks to skirt the coverage rules has constantly inflamed opposition to Obamacare.
Chris Jennings, a longtime health policy hand who helped the White House during the final implementation push, says the employer mandate has become a “political irritant” — although he didn’t take a stance on whether it should stay, go or be replaced with some other Democrat-blessed way of helping cover workers.
“The issue really becomes, ‘Do we need it or do we not need it?’” Jennings said. “It’s complicated to enforce; it is somewhat burdensome to some employers. But it does contribute to the underlying financing of the law.”
Republicans, of course, have always hated the employer mandate. In different times, that could make it a prime target for a bipartisan overhaul. But as with all things Obamacare, election-year politics gum up the gears. Democrats are promising to improve Obamacare, Republicans are vowing to kill it, and neither party wants to let the other score a health care point before Election Day — even when they both find fault with the employer mandate.
“Very few problems are in danger of being solved before the election,” Gibbs said in a recent phone interview. “I don’t think you can wipe away the idea that employers are going to have to contribute. I think there are just far less onerous [ways] … to do something like that.”
Democrats remain committed to the individual mandate — the core of the coverage expansion through the new Obamacare markets. And they aren’t tossing specific benefit requirements either, like the controversial birth control coverage rule that was just curtailed by the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby religious freedom case.
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