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" All that&amp;#039;s missing at this point is an unfortunate accident while docking in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Now business has scored another win: They&amp;#039;ve gotten the mandate delayed from 2014 to 2015. The White House swears this is a one-year delay to streamline the reporting requirements. But business lobbyists will no doubt work to make it an endless delay. For reasons explained here, I&amp;#039;d be happy to see them succeed. There are smart ways to construct an employer mandate. But the specific employer mandate that ended up in Obamacare is not smartly constructed. In the small number of firms who are right around 50 employees and don&amp;#039;t offer insurance, it creates an incentive against hiring more full-time workers, and for cutting the hours of some of the full-time workers you already have. This was obvious from the day it was introduced. Isn&amp;#039;t is painfully obvious by now that the entire Affordable Care Act was not &amp;quot;smartly constructed&amp;quot;? Wasn&amp;#039;t that &amp;quot;obvious from the day it was introduced&amp;quot;? I&amp;#039;ve never seen a piece of legislation so wide open for sabotage, so jerry-rigged with self-destruct mechanisms, and as open to outright vandalism as any New York City subway car. Looked at in the right light, this thing seems obviously built to blow itself up, although, admittedly, it&amp;#039;s had a little help in that regard. All of this, of course, is a function of the various deals and schemes and kickbacks, and all the courtship of eventually useless congressional meatsacks like Joe Lieberman and Olympia Snowe, that were required to get the thing passed at all. Leave aside the Rube Goldbergish construction of the new health-care regime, it also depended on Republicans keeping their word, and American business behaving as though it cared about both its workers and the country. These, of course, are considerations only among those who believe in fairy tales. Politically, this thing was the equivalent of that block of flats in the Monty Python skit that was built through hypnosis. Within minutes of the White House announcement,some employer groups were already making further demands. The International Franchise Association praised the delay, which it had lobbied for, but also said it did not go far enough. (Unpossible! I am shocked --SHOCKED!) &amp;quot;We need to make sure that we don&amp;#039;t forget that this is still a problem,&amp;quot; IFA&amp;#039;s Judith Thorman said. &amp;quot;There is still the definition of [what constitutes] a full-time employee that we&amp;#039;re going to try and pursue. That&amp;#039;s a significant issue for us.&amp;quot; And it will be until somebody jams a unionized workforce up the IFA&amp;#039;s ass. But, no matter. Greatest piece of social legislation since the Great Society. And it will be, if it ever gets off the ground. The crowing, by the way, already has begun. The alternative Republican solution is, of course, nothing. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a23370/the-problem-with-obamacare/>