Employers Dumping Employee Health Insurance.

The Affordable Care Act is coming at just the right time. While Republicans claim they're tying to keep your current doctor and health plan, their policies have encouraged business to dump employees to save money. From the Economic Policy Institute: 

The expansion of insurance is particularly important now as a growing share of Americans are without health coverage. Historically, Americans under age 65 have received insurance through the workplace, but since 2000, that valuable source of coverage hasdeclined every year for 11 years running, a total decline of over 10 percentage points, as shown below.

So the mandate makes reform more efficient. This means it must be opposed by conservatives, because they have all along been determined to make any health reform as inefficient as possible. Remember the 2006 Medicare Part D legislation that cost way too much because it barred the government from bargaining with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices? And which subsidized private HMOs to cover Medicare beneficiaries? Remember the public option, which would’ve saved the public money but was taken out of the ACA in the early stages? Remember the voucherization of Medicare called for in the Ryan budget, which would insure that Americans spend far more to cover health costs in the future?

This was no grand constitutional issue, this was just conservatives doing what they reflexively do when it comes to health reform: trying to make sure it’s as inefficient as possible.