One of the Obama administration's biggest selling points for the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, has been that there would be firm caps set for out-of-pocket medical expenses. Insurance companies would only be able to charge up to certain annual limits, thus sparing everyday Americans from potentially enormous treatment bills. During the last two election cycles, the president and his allies utilized this feature to argue the direct benefit of Obamacare for taxpayers.
It seems that promise will have to wait until 2015, a full year after the major overhauls will be launched and the insurance marketplaces are expected to be active. According to a recent piece published by The New York Times, the federal government quietly postponed the insurer spending cap requirement until 2015, citing industry complaints about complex reporting requirements.
An unnamed Obama administration official told the source in an interview that the change had nothing to do with implementation "glitches" widely reported in the media.
"We knew this was an important issue. We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health plan sponsors and carriers, which told us that their computer systems were not set up to aggregate all of a person's out-of-pocket costs," the person said. "They asked for more time to comply."
This revelation is yet another step in the Obama administration's walk-back from Obamacare, which it knows all too well will prove to be nothing but a death-knell for small businesses and any recovery in the job market. Only by delaying elements that hurt the nation does the president and his fellow Democrats hope to fool voters ahead of the 2014 midterm elections, rather than enacting meaningful economic reforms.
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