The Obama administration confirmed Wednesday that it is delaying by two years Obamacare’s new rules setting minimum coverage requirements on health plans offered by insurers.
The delay will allow Americans to keep their health plans that do not meet the new requirements until after the 2014 midterm elections. More health plan cancellations would have occured this year had the new rules gone into effect.
Senior administration officials claimed that approximately 500,000 people currently have plans that do not meet the threshold.
Republican lawmakers expressed outrage about this latest Obamacare delay from the White House.
“If ObamaCare is as great as Democrats say it is, why are they constantly having to delay parts of it? Each and every delay of ObamaCare is an admission that the Democrats’ signature law is hurting Americans and an obvious attempt to try to save the jobs of vulnerable congressional Democrats come November,” Republican Sen. John Thune said in a statement.
“If the president were half as concerned about the American people as he is about helping his Democrat colleagues up for re-election, he would scrap this entire law and start over with bipartisan reforms that will actually help decrease health care costs and expand care,” Thune said.
“While the president assails Congress for voting to protect all Americans from the disastrous law, the administration has acted dozens of times over the last year to unilaterally delay or change the law because it was not ready for prime time,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Rep. Fred Upton.