Republicans have been trying to blame everything on the Affordable Care Act including long standing health care issues, unemployment, the poor performance of Denver in the Super Bowl, and Justin Beiber’s recent antics. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little, but to blame Obamacare for any of these problems is untrue. I’ve already discussed the false claims from conservatives that the Congressional Budget Office shows that Obamacare will increase unemployment when it will actually do the reverse and decrease unemployment.
Unemployment is a serious problem but the attempts to tie it to the Affordable Care Act do not hold up. In addition to the information released by the Congressional Budget Office, the argument that employers are not hiring due to the mandate to provide insurance coverage also fails to hold up. The argument fails to take into account the subsidies which will help employers provide the coverage, along with the fact that the employer mandate had not been scheduled to start until 2015. The White House has today announced a further delay in the employer mandate until 2016 for employers with 50 to 99 employees. (The mandate does not affect employers with under 50 employees).
Derek Thompson has more on the myth that Obama has been killing jobs or is responsible for an increase in part-time employment.
Paul Krugman looked more at the unemployed, and how the right wing is impervious to evidence regarding government action.
Steve Benen explains once again what the “insurance trap” means and why freeing people from having to keep their current job to maintain their insurance is a feature, not a bug, of Obamacare. Face it, if the conservatives don’t understand this yet, they are (intentionally) never going to understand.
Update: Sarah Kliff has a good rundown of the additional changes announced today including relaxing the requirements for employees covered by large companies. The most important change is probably that volunteers won’t be counted as full-time employees. There had been some speculation that volunteers such as volunteer firefighters would be covered by the mandate, making it more expensive to use such volunteers. She also makes the valid point that, as the majority of companies offer insurance, the postponement of the employer mandate won’t affect very many people.
The conservative reaction has been to denounce this as a dictatorial action from Obama. If these people are so concerned about potential abuse of Executive power, where were they during the Bush years when Republicans backed the Unitary Executive theory which would greatly expand the power of the President (or during the Busy years, the Vice President)?
Update II: Two more thoughts on the conservative spin:
Strange that they are complaining so much about a delay in the employer mandate when they have been predicting such dire consequences of the mandate.
The reason much of this, right or wrong, is being done by executive order is that the system is broken. We know whose fault that is. Congress has voted, at last count, 47 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act but the Republicans are not willing to work on fine tuning the law as would normally be done after such a huge law was passed.
Cross posted at The Moderate Voice
Given how many times this president, with a twirl of his pen, has changed the *Law of the Land* as passed by Congress according to the Constitution, may I ask if the Law of the Land in America is worth a bucket of spit?
And in what way does his differ from Mr. Mugabe, another man who makes it up as he goes along?
He has done it far less than his recent predecessors.
Did you see the link I left for you on neurotransmitters and addiction at the end of our recent discussion on the topic?
Sorry, Ron, I missed it but I’ll look it up tomorrow.
As to my main point, irrespective of which president wrote his own personal law the most times, what does it say about constitutional legality in the USA?
There are many ways in which our government does not work as one would expect from reading the Constitution. Check out declaration of war, for another example.
If you want to question this, it is fine if you are consistent. However we saw immediate attacks on Obama regarding this from conservatives with cries of tyranny when they had no objection to similar actions by Bush and ignore the fact that this is totally business as usual for the government. If someone is concerned about executive overreach, this is a pretty trivial example compared to how Bush ignored Congress.