Joe Manchin: Why Sure I'll Vote In Favor of a One Year Delay in the Individual Mandate

Joe Manchin is a Democrat who serves, supposedly, West Virginia, so his personal political situation requires him to pretend to be somewhat more solicitous of actual public opinion than, say, Cokewhore Roberts.

This is not clearly an endorsement of Boehner's plan -- or his opening offer, anyway -- to delay all of ObamaCare for one year in exchange for a raising of the debt ceiling.

Because this report claims Manchin is speaking of a one-year delay in one of the many unpopular parts of ObamaCare, the Individual Mandate.

“There’s no way I could not vote for it,” Manchin said at a Bloomberg Government breakfast today. “It’s very reasonable and sensible.” Enlarge image Senator Joe Manchin

...

Manchin, 66, said he’d be willing to delay the individual mandate as part of the budget negotiations because the Obama administration in July gave businesses an extra year to provide their workers with health insurance.

“Don’t put the mandate on the American public right now,” Manchin said. “Give them at least a year. If you know you couldn’t bring the corporate sector, you gave them a year, don’t you think it’d be fair?”

Well that complicates Obama's messaging. He complicates it further by offering to "negotiate" for the Debt Ceiling Hike -- which contradicts Obama's position that there will be no negotiations about anything at all.

The president said today that “I will not negotiate on anything” regarding an increase in the borrowing authority.

“Congress needs to put an end to governing crisis-to-crisis,” Obama said at a Largo, Maryland community college.

This all occurs in the context of a disastrous, Not Ready for Primetime roll out of ObamaCare, in Primetime, unfortunately, and, as Allah notes, possible catastrophe on the horizon.

What’s potentially not survivable [for Democrats' political position] is rolling out the exchanges now minus the individual mandate, which means lots of young adults will face no legal compulsion to buy in. If (as Bill Clinton noted two days ago) healthy uninsured people refuse to fork over their money, then insurers suddenly don’t have a pool of revenue to cover all the people with preexisting conditions who are signing up, and then the whole scheme starts to collapse. There’ll be no delays after that; if insurers start crumbling, we’ll be in post-ObamaCare mode as a country.

posted by Ace at 01:58 PM

| Access Comments