By Jack Strayer

As a former health policy lobbyist in Washington DC, I spent more than 15 years working on health reforms, chief among them Health Savings Accounts. I have experience with how our political system is driven, and since the Clinton Administration, health reform has always been a policy driver.

It has become quite obvious over the past several months that our political system is currently being driven the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare).

Red flags began flying earlier this summer when President Obama signed an executive order moving the effective date of ObamaCare’s employer mandate from Oct. 1, 2013 to Oct. 1, 2014.

Corporate America was not quite ready to adopt the new measures requiring employers to provide health insurance access to their workers if they employed more than 49 workers. So they were granted a reprieve.

At the time, Republicans in the U.S. Congress wanted the individual mandate to be delayed one year as well.  The individual mandate requires that each and every American have a health insurance policy by March 1, 2014, or pay a penalty to the IRS.  Some of these policies will be heavily subsidized by the taxpayers and some will be offered through Medicaid. But the individual mandate does require some out of pocket expenses that many uninsured Americans are not prepared to pay.

The recent Battle for the Budget began in earnest when the Republicans tied a delay in the enactment of the individual mandate to the proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2014 that began Oct. 1, 2013.  Well, the Republican plan failed and the government shut down and the economy lost $24 billion in a matter of weeks.

At about the same time, the website created for individuals to purchase their ObamaCare insurance plans went online and immediately crashed, and so did President Obama’s approval rating which now stands at 41 percent according to the most recent Washington Post-ABC News opinion poll.

We can only now imagine what would have happened if President Obama had signed the executive order to delay the implementation of the individual mandate when he was urged to do so during the failed budget negotiations.  First, there would have been no government shutdown. Second, the problems with the HealthCare.gov website could have been remedied before it was launched.

Third, the White House and the Congress could have moved on to more pressing issues like reducing the deficit and increasing private sector job opportunities.  After all, those are the issues that should be driving our political system.

A native of Niles, Jack Strayer moved back home in 2009 after living and working in Washington DC since 1976.  Strayer has served as a congressional staffer, state legislative press secretary, federal registered lobbyist and Vice President of the National Center for Policy Analysis.