“There’s no way I could not vote for it,” Manchin said at a Bloomberg Government breakfast today. “It’s very reasonable and sensible.” [...]
“Don’t put the mandate on the American public right now,” Manchin said. “Give them at least a year. If you know you couldn’t bring the corporate sector, you gave them a year, don’t you think it’d be fair?”
Manchin's defection will put pressure on other red state Senate Democrats to agree to a compromise delaying the individual mandate. According to a paper by the liberal-leaning Urban Institute, a one-year delay of the individual mandate could "seriously disrupt" the entire law.
Link to full story at the Weekly Standard quoting Bloomberg.
