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I have to enroll every year and open enrollment time is about up. But, the employer programs get a one year delay. So, those plans wouldn't crumble until next year.

Delay Of Obamacare's Employer Mandate Exacerbates An Already Bad Situation

Last month, the Obama Administration proclaimed itself a friend of American business by announcing a one-year delay, until 2015, of the “employer mandate” — the provision of its signature health reform law that requires businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health insurance.

“We have listened to your feedback,” Treasury official Mark Mazur said on July 2. “And we are taking action.”

But in the weeks since, it’s become increasingly clear that the delay will provide little practical relief for businesses. Obamacare will still force them to pay more for health coverage. The delay simply gives them one more year to react — by cutting benefits, trimming hours, or reducing staff.

At the end of July, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) told a congressional panel that the employer mandate delay only “exacerbates questions” about the administration’s “ability to implement and administer (Obamacare) in any type of cost-effective and fair manner.”

Small businesses “continue to be in an economic holding pattern,” noted William Dennis, the director of NFIB’s research foundation.

According to a recent Chamber of Commerce survey, 71 percent of small businesses say that Obamacare will make it harder to grow their businesses. Half say that they’ll either cut hours or shift to part-time workers to dodge the additional costs the employer mandate will bring.

Government employment data are starting to reflect these survey results. The average workweek for nonsupervisory retail workers dropped to 30.1 hours in June. That’s more than a half-hour less than just six months prior, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What’s worse, the nation’s most vulnerable workers will bear the brunt of the mandate’s ill effects, since they’re most likely to hold the kind of jobs companies are cutting.

The law actually gives businesses a powerful incentive to avoid hiring low-income workers in the first place. A company faces a penalty of $3,000 for every worker who gets subsidized health insurance in Obamacare’s exchanges. But the subsidies are only available to lower-income families.

Why does that matter? As James Capretta, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, explained in testimony before Congress on July 10, “a small restaurant chain might find it more attractive to hire a low wage service worker who happens to live in a middle class neighborhood than to hire someone from a lower income area who might be eligible for the health law’s premium subsidies.”

The White Castle hamburger chain told lawmakers that “it is the mounting uncertainty surrounding the health care law that has brought us to a standstill.” In the years before Obamacare, White Castle had been opening an average eight new restaurants a year. But in the past two it’s had no net growth.

White Castle vice president Jamie Richardson also said that, delay or not, the company is considering only hiring part-time workers in the future, because it expects Obamacare will boost its insurance costs by some 35 percent.

The high-end Wegman’s grocery store chain revealed in July that it would drop health benefits for its part-time workers. The company had previously extended health coverage to workers who put in as few as 20 hours a week. Next year, those employees will have to buy insurance on their own in one of Obamacare’s government-run exchanges.

So much for Obama’s oft-repeated promise that everyone who liked their coverage would get to keep it under his health reform law.