Although he has yet to explain the approval criteria or legal basis for granting waivers of certain requirements under his new health care law, President Obama has promised to stop handing them out to his friends and political supporters when Congress returns to Washington in September.

Until then, however, it’s business as usual.

 According to The Hill:

“The Obama administration granted another 106 waivers last month from part of the healthcare reform law — the first round of three-year waivers the Health and Human Services Department has approved.”

Apparently someone realized that, by extending the length of each waiver from one year to three years, the need to renew them could conveniently be postponed until the 2012 elections are over.

After all, for a first-term president whose signature legislative achievement has been decidedly unpopular, handing out fresh exemptions to his political allies just months before an election could create the appearance of impropriety or favoritism.

Better to get all the impropriety and favoritism out of the way up front and hope the voters have enough time to forget.

The Hill goes on to report that, “The new approvals bring the total number of waivers to 1,472, according to HHS. Those figures cover waivers granted through the end of July.” No doubt the final waiver count will be closer to 2,000.

Of course, the real shame is not that all these waivers have gone disproportionately to unions and large corporations with thousands of employees like McDonald’s. The worst part is that only politically-connected groups are able to opt-out of this unconstitutional law.

Rather than try to stem to tide of waivers flowing from the White House, perhaps Congress should follow Senator John Barrasso’s lead and give individual Americans the ability to apply for their own ObamaCare exemption.

As Barrasso has said, “Each waiver demonstrates that the President’s health care law is a complete failure... It’s not fair that a particular group of Americans, including union employees, don’t have to abide by the law. Millions of other Americans across the country deserve the same freedom."