Individual Mandate Delayed For One Year: Cool

The Weekly Standard is reporting:

The White House is saying that it will use "enforcement discretion" to allow illegal health insurance plans to be able to still be sold. That is, the Obama administration will not enforce the penalty on individuals for not having eligible health insurance plans and they'll allow the insurance companies to still sell so-called bad plans -- plans they technically can't sell under Obamacare.

The employer mandate was already delayed a full year.

Again, for newbies, there are three parts to ObamaCare:

• employer mandate: delayed for one year
• individual mandate: delayed for one year
• tax on medical devices: I don't follow 

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The Los Angeles Times has this headline: "Obama: 'We fumbled the rollout."

A couple days ago I either posted or told someone (I don't think I posted it; I probably just mentioned it to someone who prefers not to be identified) that President Obama had hoped his interview with an NBC correspondent a few days would have put an end to all this ObamaCare hysteria. Usually, an interview with the President on an issue comes at the tipping point, and in most cases, the timing is chosen/fixed by the President to tell Americans he considers the issue over and done with and he is moving on. Even if the media and the public are not moving, by his interview, he is telegraphing to Americans that he is moving on. For him, the hysteria is all getting "silly."

So, now again, President Obama appears before the America public and apologizes again; essentially it's the interview all over again, with the addition of a "fix" to the problem. He, I assume, is telegraphing to the media and the public that, again, he is moving on.

The problem: I don't think the media and the public are ready to move. Something tells me he will be doing yet another interview and/or press conference addressing yet another issue with ObamaCare.

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This is the real problem: the insurance companies have set rates for 2014 based on their analyses of ObamaCare prior to the roll-out. With the president's announcement, it permits the insurance companies to reset premiums. Now that the insurance companies have seen how few Americans are going to sign up with the exchange roll-out debacle, the only option the insurance companies have is to increase their 2014 premiums. Up until this morning, those rates had been requested, approved, and set by the various state insurance regulators. Wow.