Mandate

Like everything else in ACA, the employer mandate as implemented was a bit dumb. I can imagine that the reporting requirements are generally onerous, and specifically the 50 employee hard cutoff for when the mandate kicks in is ridiculous. But lots of dumb things were put in there to placate Lieberdems and President Snowe, and to ensure a good CBO score because that's all that matters. Removing the employer mandate is going to push all those people into individual plans, many with subsidies, which is of course also a dumb system, but the point is the budgetary cost to the government is now likely to be significantly higher. At some level I don't much care about that, but if we were going to accept a significantly higher public cost we probably could've spent it on a few more nice things instead of letting employers off the hook.