Late Wednesday, the Obama administration announced a tweak in the Obamacare individual mandate:
An extra six weeks in which to purchase health insurance on the exchanges before facing a penalty. This was done to "clear up a timing confusion about the 2010 law, which for the first time requires most Americans to buy health coverage or face a penalty."
Under the law, health plans available through the new federal or state marketplaces will start Jan. 1, but the open enrollment period runs through the end of March. The law also says that people will be fined only if they do not have coverage for three months in a row. The question has been this: Do people need to be covered by March 31, or merely to have signed up by then, given that insurance policies have a brief lag before they take effect?
The administration made clear Wednesday night that people who buy coverage at any point during the open enrollment period will not pay a penalty.
With mass hysteria being frothed up by the Right, this was immediately seized up as a declaration of defeat by the administration, calling it a
delay in the mandate, claiming "that Democrats now support the exact same individual mandate delay Republicans were demanding in exchange for funding the government a month ago." Which is a bunch of hooey given that the real demand coming from Republicans was the total defunding of Obamacare. And that this policy clarification is not a delay at all. More revisionist history from Republicans.
There is one (sort of) Democrat who supports a delay in the mandate: Sen. Joe Manchin (WV). He's working with Republicans on their bill to delay the mandate. That's not really news. Manchin has always been against the mandate. A handful of other Democrats are lining up behind a call for the administration to extend the open enrollment period beyond March 31. But it's not what Republicans are going to try to spin it as: Democrats in disarray over Obamacare.