Ezra's Mandate With Destiny

Ezra Klein argues (as he has for years now) that the Obamacare employer mandate was a terrible idea, always had been a terrible idea, and always will be.  So he's outright gleeful to see the Treasury Department direct the IRS to delay implementation of the mandate until 2015.

The irony is that the worker-based employer mandate got passed in part because employers preferred it to a payroll-based mandate — a fact that puzzled Senate health aides at the time, but that they made peace with in order to pass the bill.

Part of the reason is that the mandate, as written, affects relatively few employers. “You’ve got 5.7 million firms in the U.S.,” says Wharton’s Mark Duggan, who served as the top health economist at White House’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2010. “Only 210,000 have more than 50 employees. So 96 percent of firms aren’t affected. Then if you look among those firms with 50 or more employees, something on the order of 95 percent offer health insurance. So it’s basically 10,000 or so employers who have more than 50 employees and don’t offer coverage.” Those companies probably employ around one percent of American workers.

But that’s still a lot of employers, and a lot of workers, and so the health-care law has gotten a stream of bad press as one employer or another threatens to cut hours or fire workers in order to dodge the penalty.

It’s also proven difficult to enforce. Implementing the mandate requires a complex reporting process that’s left the administration flooded with comments from anxious employers — even those who offer insurance and have nothing to fear from the provision.

On Tuesday night, the White House solved that problem, at least temporarily, by announcing that that the penalties won’t go into effect until 2015. They say they plan to use the interregnum to simplify and streamline the reporting process. Until then, compliance will be “voluntary.”

Now if the mandate never gets enforced and gets fixed, great.  But let's not forget that the real problem is that Republicans are breaking everything they can about Obamacare, and it's forced the Obama administration to resort to goofy solutions like this.

There's a better way, but it'll never happen as long the GOP controls the House and an overwhelming majority of states.  

The bigger issue is Ezra's wrong about the "lot of employers".  It's one percent, people.  One.  Perspective.