I was surprised the Obama Administration decided to delay the “Employer Mandate”. I understand the “technical” reasons for the delay but my gut feeling is that they delayed it because this policy had a very limited effect on health care and was quite unpopular with businesses. It was all pain and no gain. That is a bad combination in any year but especially during an election year.

So if we follow the Administration’s reasoning to avoid unnecessary pain in an election year, it would be logical for them to delay enforcing the individual mandate, too. It would make sense for the Administration to wait for the IRS scandals to settle down before they ask the IRS to enforce an unpopular program of questionable benefit. It is pretty amazing that “over the next decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the IRS will need up to $10 billion more in funding as a result.” My inner engineer says that we are spending $10 billion on something we got for free before the Affordable Care Act.