So, instead of taking opportunities to put Republican legislators on the spot, the President chose the risky course of potentially illegal executive action. The reason can only be that this approach allows him to line-item veto parts of Obamacare without subjecting the changes to CBO scoring that would require “pay fors”. Although the OPM’s decision on staffers’ health benefits is unlikely to have a significant impact on the costs of Obamacare (maybe $40 million or so a year, according to my back-of-the envelope estimate), the same cannot be said of decisions like the one-year delay of the employer mandate....If Congress had amended Obamacare to delay the employer mandate, it would have had to find $13 billion of savings from subsidies to health insurers channeled through exchanges, expansion of Medicaid dependency, or other pockets of Obamacare spending. This, of course, would have been intolerable to President Obama. Expect more executive nullification of politically inconvenient parts of Obamacare during the rest of 2013 and 2014.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Executive Nullification: Why Obama Won't Allow Congress To Legalize His Changes To PPACA
This is from John Graham writing at Forbes:
