The employer mandate has been delayed for a year, until 2015. Under this provision of the Affordable Care Act, all employers with more than 50 employees are obliged to provide health insurance for their employees or pay “shared responsibility payments.” According to a statement by Mark Mazur, Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy at Treasury, this year-long delay is in response to complaints by companies that the insurance reporting requirements under Section 6055 are complex and require more time to implement. requirements, and connected reporting requirements, are complex and that companies need more time to implement them effectively. Once that’s the case, it’s impractical to impose the cover-or-pay requirement. This seems a bit substantively backward, but the overall effect is that both the reporting and insuring requirements are delayed.
The individual mandate, under which all individuals not otherwise insured must purchase coverage individually, is unaffected by this delay. But the implementation of some subsidies in the exchanges is linked to employers’ decisions to offer coverage, and require accurate reporting, so exchange administration might get a bit more complicated, and will require some statutory and regulatory parsing.
It’s a bit surprising to think that even major areas like this still don’t even have proposed rules yet. To be sure, had the Supreme Court’s decision on ACA’s constitutionality or the presidential elections come out differently, it’s likely that effort readying rules would have been wasted, but that understandable delay seems to be causing additional rollout problems now.
