Philip Klein wonders:
Obama, no doubt, wants to avoid the political embarrassment of a delay — or even the mere suggestion of one. But what happens if it’s the middle of December and enrollments are nowhere near where they need to be to make the system viable? What if, by necessity, he has to seek a delay?
The operating assumption would be that Republicans would jump at the chance to delay it. But after the past few weeks, can we really be sure that this would be the case?
It’s perfectly conceivable that if such a scenario played out, the position of the Tea Party activists and their allies in Congress would be that delaying the law for a year would be tantamount to a bailout of Obamacare.
Should Healthcare.gov fail to improve, Chait concedes that delaying the individual mandate may be necessary:
Here … is the kind of individual-mandate delay that would make sense. It would apply only to those states lacking a functioning website. (States that established their own exchanges are, in general, experiencing much better functionality than the states that boycotted their exchange and relied on the federal government to set up a site for them.) The delay would be tied to the workability of that state’s website — no reason to delay California’s individual mandate just because people in New Jersey can’t log on. And the process for making this determination would have to rest with the Department of Health and Human Services, or some other body that is trying to make the law succeed, not one that’s trying to destroy it.
Note that the individual mandate in 2014 is only a token $95 annual tax. Its main purpose is as a signaling device that everybody should get covered.
Chait is wrong about that last point:
The individual mandate’s penalty is not $95 in year one. It’s $95 or 1 percent of your taxable income, whichever is greater. So if you make $80,000 in taxable income, the penalty is $800.
The Dish 