Employer Mandate Delay: The Path to a Single-Payer Healthcare

This week, preventive and climacteric medical specialist, author, and healthcare speaker Elizabeth Lee Vliet offers Physicians Practice readers insight into the real reason behind the delay of the employer health insurance mandate in the Affordable Care Act, which she will share in a much anticipated presentation at the International Health Strategies Conference 2013, held this year, October 6-10 in Tucson, Ariz.

Martin Merritt:

I previously wrote about the delay in the employer mandate in July. You suspect there is more to the delay than simply allowing employers time to adjust?

Elizabeth Lee Vliet:

The employer mandate requires that businesses with more than 50 full-time employees must provide health insurance for all employees, and that insurance must meet the new standards set forth in the new law. Businesses that do not comply must pay a financial penalty for each employee, which for large companies can run into the millions of dollars annually.

To understand the reason for this "selective enforcement," we must first understand this fact: President Barack Obama wants a single-payer healthcare system in the U.S. This is not a secret. In 2003, he said: "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer healthcare system for America, but as all of you know, we may not get there immediately." In 2007, he said: "But I don’t think we will be able to eliminate employer-based coverage immediately. There is potentially going to be some transition time."

MM:

So the Obama Administration’s hidden agenda in delaying the rollout of the employer mandate appears to be a ploy to move us even faster to a full government-run, single-payer medical system in the U.S.?

ELV:

Most definitely. By forcing individuals to purchase compliant healthcare plans but not forcing employers to provide those plans, Obama is creating a swell of 10 million to13 million workers that must enroll in health insurance, but cannot obtain it from their employers. These workers thus have no choice but to use the government-controlled health insurance exchanges, or else pay a financial penalty. This will double the number of workers forced to get health insurance on the exchanges. That, in turn, leads to massive cost-shifting onto the backs of taxpayers subsidizing the health insurance exchanges, rather than having businesses pay for employees’ health insurance.

Higher taxes are the result. Individuals are also facing 20 percent to 100 percent increases in their private health insurance premiums for 2014 to pay for the expanded mandates of Obamacare required coverage. That means workers no longer getting health insurance from their employer will be paying far more for individual coverage. Squeezed from both directions, it is obvious that all this will collapse on itself. At that point, there will be no other option but for the government to step in and save the day, which is what the Obama administration wanted all along.

MM:

It almost sounds like an episode of "I Love Lucy," where Lucy wants to steal the show, but needs Ricky to think it was actually his idea to cast Lucy in the starring role. She prevails, not because she is best suited for the job, but because she is the only option left?

ELV:

Obama and his party advocates sold the healthcare "reform" to the public by saying "reform" would increase competition and patient choice. But the perverse incentives, draconian regulations, and massively complex and unworkable law is a clever disguise for the real goal: to drive people out of private, employer-provided insurance, as a stepping stone to a government-run, single-payer system. Once we know the ultimate goal, the purpose behind the delay of the employer mandate seems clearer - to hurry the "transition time" away from employer-based health insurance and push more workers into the arms of government control to reach their dream of a single-payer system.

For more from Vliet on this issue, read her recent post on the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons' website, or go to Vliet’s educational website.