Administration Grants Itself 3-Month Exemption from Individual Mandate

October 24, 2013 - 10:11 AM
By Terence P. Jeffrey

The Obama administration is granting itself a three-month exemption from the Obamacare mandate that requires individuals to buy health insurance—even though the exemption, as written into the law itself, was plainly intended to provide forbearance to individual citizens who failed to meet the mandate, not to an incompetent administration that has failed to effectively implement the law.

In July, the administration similarly unilaterally suspended for one year the Obamacare mandate that requires large employers to provide insurance to their workers.

In neither case did President Obama seek congressional action to change the terms of the law--even though Article 1 Section 3 of the Constitution says the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

“The Obama administration said Wednesday night that it will give Americans who buy health insurance through the new online marketplaces an extra six weeks to obtain coverage before they incur a penalty,” the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

“The announcement means that those who buy coverage through the exchange will have until March 31 to sign up for a plan, according to an official with the Department of Health and Human Services,” said the Post.

“The law also says that people will be fined only if they do not have coverage for three months in a row,” says the Post.

However, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act expressly mandates that individuals “shall” have government-approved health care coverage by January 2014, or else pay a fine. It then extends an exemption to the individual mandate to certain classes of people and also provides exemptions from the Obamacare penalty to individuals under certain circumstances—including those who have a continuous coverage gap of three months or less in any year after the mandate kicks in in January 2014.

The law does not give a three-month exemption to the government.

Read more:

http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/terence-p-...ividual-mandate