Is Obamacare falling apart?

Megan McArdle has the discussion at Bloomberg:

· A one-year delay of the employer mandate (which our own Ezra Klein has shown is critical to both coverage expansion and cost control). It seems unclear that this will ever go into effect, as the regulatory difficulties of tracking compliance are enormous, and enforcing it will trigger unpopular changes in working hours and other conditions for many workers.
· Numerous extensions of enrollment and payment deadlines, even though these have led to consumer confusion.
· Changes in the rules governing the “risk corridor” programs that cover excess losses at insurers, with more potentially in the works. This buys peace with the insurers, but is going to be incredibly politically difficult for the administration to defend when the costs become clear. . . .

She explains what lies ahead:

· 2014: Small-business policy cancellations. This year, the small-business market is going to get hit with the policy cancellations that roiled the individual market last year. Some firms will get better deals, but others will find that their coverage is being canceled in favor of more expensive policies that don’t cover as many of the doctors or procedures that they want. This is going to be a rolling problem throughout the year.
· Summer 2014: Insurers get a sizable chunk of money from the government to cover any excess losses. When the costs are published, this is going to be wildly unpopular: The administration has spent three years saying that Obamacare was the antidote to abuses by Big, Bad Insurance Companies, and suddenly it’s a mechanism to funnel taxpayer money to them?
· Fall 2014: New premiums are announced.
· 2014 and onward: Medicare reimbursement cuts eat into hospital margins, triggering a lot of lobbying and sad ads about how Beloved Local Hospital may have to close.
· Spring 2015: The Internal Revenue Service starts collecting individual mandate penalties: 1 percent of income in the first year. That’s going to be a nasty shock to folks who thought the penalty was just $95. I, like many other analysts, expect the administration to announce a temporary delay sometime after April 1, 2014.
· Spring 2015: The IRS demands that people whose income was higher than they projected pay back their excess subsidies. This could be thousands of dollars.
· Spring 2015: Cuts to Medicare Advantage, which the administration punted on in 2013, are scheduled to go into effect. This will reduce benefits currently enjoyed by millions of seniors, which is why they didn’t let them go into effect this year. . . .