By now you have heard how the Obama Administration is delaying the implementation of the employer mandate for Obamacare until 2015.  While detractors of the law claim the motive behind the delay is to stop mass chaos just before the 2014 election that will harm Democrats, defenders sight other reasons.  Valarie Jarrett, senior advisor to the president said they were "listening to businesses" and the cause for the delay was “to give employers more time to comply with the new rules.”

But if giving employers more time was really the case, the administration wouldn’t have waited until just before the July 4 holiday, a time when millions of Americans are on or leaving for vacation, to announce the news.  It is well known within Washington circles the best day to get bad news out is on a Friday night or just before a holiday.  Critics of the law quickly weighed in on the timing of the announcement. 

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) stated delaying the mandate is, “a clear acknowledgment that the law is unworkable,” and “it underscores the need to repeal the law and replace it with effective, patient-centered reforms.”

American Action Forum's Douglas Holtz-Eaton said, “For a public inured to raven political decisions trumping policy, even this was a stunner…Democrats no longer face the immediate specter of running against the fallout from a heavy regulatory imposition on employers across the land.  Explaining away the mandate was going to be a big political lift; having the White House airbrush it from the landscape is way better.”

The Club for Growth, a net-work of Americans that advocates for more economic freedom, declared the delay is "a transparently political ploy to help the Democrats who voted for it to avoid the consequences at the ballot box in 2014.”

There has been story after story that Obamacare has been doing enormous harm to the economy because it is stifling growth thus slowing job creation.  It is well known too that many of the jobs that are being created are part-time jobs, one way some employers are using to avoid the healthcare mandate.

In reality, this maneuver only slows the inevitable.  Businesses must plan for the future and know that eventually they will have to deal with the mandate in Obamacare.  The delay doesn’t change anything they are experiencing now and rather than wait and put up with more headaches, what the delay could do is spur businesses to dump their health insurance entirely.  They will tell their employees to get their insurance via the Exchanges, the marketplaces located in the states where individuals can purchase private insurance.  After all, Valerie Jarrett said the administration was, “full steam ahead for the Marketplaces opening on October 1.”

But a column in the Washington Post shows even that declaration is dubious.  Never mind that 27 states are refusing to create Exchanges, leaving it the Feds to organize them.  According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 17 states have agreed to create a state-based Exchange and seven are planning to partner with the federal government.  You can read about individual states and their progress on the Exchanges here.

Meanwhile, the House Republicans wrote a letter to President Obama today demanding that he delay the individual mandate as well.  They said, “Your decision to delay one part of the law affecting employers and leave in place provisions regulating individual and family health care creates many new questions and concerns.”  They asked the president to answer several questions such as the legality of making the decision to unilaterally delay the employer mandate and how the delay will affect the number of people receiving subsidies.

The administration has had three years to implement Obamacare.  This delay proves the law is too big, too complicated, and too burdensome.  It is well on its way to imploding.  I can sum all this up in three words: “What a mess.”