The White House's recent decision to delay part of its health care overhaul illustrates six truths about the law that its supporters can't easily acknowledge.
First, important parts of it are badly designed. President Barack Obama's administration has pulled back on the employer mandate — the part of the law that fines large businesses that don't offer health insurance — because, among other things, it threatened to depress full-time employment before the next congressional elections.
The mandate is not an incidental feature of the law. It's there because without it some of those large employers would drop coverage and leave their employees to get heavily subsidized policies on the insurance exchanges the law creates. More people on the exchanges would mean higher federal spending — and more disruption to people's existing coverage — than supporters of the law promised when they were trying to pass it.