The Healthcare Individual Mandate Has Been Delayed…Again

In even more bad news for the much-maligned ObamaCare, the Healthcare Individual Mandate has come under fire from new legislation from the House Republican Study Committee, the chairman of which has managed to have the requirement for the Healthcare Individual Mandate delayed until 2016. This particular element of ObamaCare being delayed means that there are no penalties for those of you who that didn't have full healthcare coverage by the end of 2014.

The penalties themselves would have first fallen due in 2014, with a payment of at least $95, or 1% of your individual income payable due to your lack of health insurance. In 2015 the penalty scales up rapidly to $325 per person, or 2% of your individual income. By 2016 this penalty would now be $695, or 2.5% of your individual income. Unfortunately most people simply don't have very much disposable income at the moment, which makes paying any additional penalties for healthcare insurance they can't afford in the first place an impossible situation.

ObamaCare has been under constant criticism since it was first rolled out, and since then has been suffering from any of a number of embarrassing problems. The most recent change to the implementation of The Affordable Healthcare Act has been the announcement by the Obama Administration that the healthcare mandate for employers with between 50 - 100 employees has been extended until 2016, and all companies have at least until 2015 to have their employee healthcare issues resolved.

This new piece of legislation is called the Freeing Americans from Inequitable Requirements (FAIR) Act, and although it uses the word "freeing" in the name of the act using the word "delaying" would be far more appropriate. With that being said this piece of legislation does make sense because it give the average American taxpayer the same breaks that large companies and corporations are receiving - there's little point or logic in penalizing individuals as part of ObamaCare when the same financial penalties for companies have been simply put off for the foreseeable future.

Although this is welcome news for many it does seem to indicate that, despite all promises to the contrary, ObamaCare is struggling to even establish itself in the American mindset, never mind gain any popularity. Implementation of The Affordable Care Act has now been delayed well over a dozen times, and this is a trend which looks set to continue, with all the promises which were made by the Obama Administration now slowly disappearing in a cloud of administrative chaos, technical issues and bipartisan political combat.

There are major concerns over the legality of this current delay, but the Obama Administration doesn't seem overly concerned with the legalities of delaying ObamaCare when it suits them to do so.

The cynics of the world see this as a purely political move on the part of the Obama Administration however, because burning tens of millions of voters with ObamaCare financial penalties just before the mid-term elections would be nothing short of political suicide for the POTUS. There is simply no way for President Obama to emerge victorious from the mid-terms if he's just taken money from people's pockets for no good reason.

In fact the more energy the Obama Administration seems to exert in trying to make ObamaCare a success the more problems that seem to crop up, casting some doubt over whether ObamaCare can ever really work no matter how hard they try.