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January 08, 2015 03:11 PM UTC

Let The Obamacare Games Begin!

  • 35 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols
Clock out.
Clock out.

Huffington Post's Mike McAuliff reports:

In yet another attempt to roll back President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, House Republicans advanced a bill Thursday that they said protects the 40-hour workweek, but that Congress' own budget analyst says damages it.

The "Save American Workers Act" targets the requirement under Obamacare that larger employers provide health insurance to employees who work at least 30 hours per week, or pay fines. The bill would raise the threshold to 40 hours…

The theory being that employers who have cut employees' hours to fewer than 30 per week to "beat" the Obamacare mandate that employees cover full time workers. The problem is, there no real evidence that has happened, despite it being one of the most frequent claims leveled by Affordable Care Act detractors:

[O]fficial data maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that there has actually been no shift toward greater part-time work. [Pols emphasis] In fact, the data shows part-time employment spiked with the recession, and has been decreasing since passage of Obamacare in 2010.

In addition, Democrats were quick to note that the official nonpartisan analyst for the House, the Congressional Budget Office, warned as recently as Wednesday that the measure was likely to create even more part-time workers. That's because vastly more Americans work 40-hour weeks than 30-hour weeks, and employers would have a greater incentive to reduce their hours if the threshold was 40 per week.

The problem with this is simple: there are many more full-time than part-time employees, and a worker is still considered full-time if they work more than 32 hours in Colorado and most other states. Moving the cutoff for required health care coverage to 40 hours per week could easily result in what Republicans say they're trying to prevent, hours reductions with an ulterior motive–and to many more workers, effectively killing off the employer mandate for millions of full-time employees to "protect" a much smaller number of people. As Colorado's Rep. Jared Polis explained today:

"If this very dangerous provision were to become law, many, many Americans would find themselves cut from 40 to 39 hours, 39 and a half hours," said Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) during floor debate. "Go home at 4:30 on Friday. Sorry, no health care."

"This is simply a bad idea, a disincentive for companies to even provide healthcare to their employees. Not only that, this is a deficit buster," Polis added. "How are we going to pay for this $53 billion that this costs?"

This is how it goes down: hurting people while pretending you're doing them a favor.

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35 thoughts on “Let The Obamacare Games Begin!”

  1. The solution to this is that all non-small businesses should add up all of their employee hours – overtime, full-time, and part-time – and calculate out the number of 35 hour FTEs that comes to. The result is the number of health insurance plans they need to cover or, if they really do need that much part-time staff, the total amount due to employees to subsidize health insurance coverage (said amount not being counted toward subsidy coverage wage calculations or taxation).

    There's no escaping it that way, and no incentive for part-time vs full-time (or under-hiring and paying overtime). If you employ 25 people or more, you are big enough to cover health care.

    Add to this the Obama Administration's expected long-overdue update to overtime wage caps, and this would be a really solid formula.

      1. It's probably describable as both a "cap" and a "floor," but I believe what Phoenix Rising is describing is maybe better described as a "threshold."  Overtime is a bit complex (because anything that costs corporations money must be, apparently).

        Basically, the question is are you, the employee, classified as exempt or not exempt (from the rules regarding payment of overtime)?  Nonexempt folks must be paid overtime (absent rampant wage theft) for hours worked over 40 in a week.  Exempt employees need not be paid overtime for hours worked beyond 40 in a week.  Simple, right?

        The mess comes when we decide who is exempt.  The Department of Labor has a whole set of criteria, based mostly around how much autonomy the employee has and how "management" their job is.  Regardless of any of these criteria, however, no employee who is paid less that $23,500 annually can be exempt from overtime pay.  That's the threshold we're talking about.  Obama is proposing to increase that rate (set around when the Camaro was first introduced) to something much higher ($70k?, not sure).  That would greatly increase the number of folks required to be paid overtime.  The Dept of Labor could also tighten up their set of criteria for what makes folks who earn more than that $70,000 exempt, pushing more of them into overtime land.

        Politico has a story that describes the issue well.

        3. If businesses had to get everything done in a 40 hour week or pay overtime, the number of mind-numbingly stupid and repetitive meetings and "professional development" seminars would rapidly decrease, or become shorter and more effective.

          Like flubber,idiocy  expands to fit the available hours, especially if self-important managers are trying to justify their positions by cramming maximum buzzwords into available space and time. 

        4. Thanks for the assist, Pcat.

          I believe the President is looking at a much more modest increase, perhaps in the $40k range. His advisers' most conservative suggestion, though, is $51k. An independent analysis suggest $58k.

          I don't think anyone aside from the dreamers in the house are expecting anything even in the $60k+ range.

            1. The only times in my working life that I have gotten overtime pay have been when I worked in "men's jobs", i.e., craft or construction work, which I did for most of my 20s.

              Female jobs, at least for women of my generation, did not include overtime pay. Now that I have a salaried job again, in a predominantly female field, the expectation is that I will work however many hours per week needed to keep up with the workload.

              Maybe I'm looking too much through a gender lens, having lived the unspoken assumption that women will work that double shift at home anyway, and so are used to piling on the hours for the greater good.

              I do hope that Obama pisses off the right once again with an executive order raising the overtime wage cap/floor/threshold, now that I know what that is.

    2. This is the today's Republican Party. The sky is green because iron-clad ideology says it is regardless of the objective fact anyone, including the Republicans, can observe it is blue. Rep. Tipton's statement that businesses have cut workers back to less than 30 hour work week is completely baseless. There is no evidence, none, to back-up his statement. The U.S. Labor Department has monitored and looked into this claim and it hasn't happened. Its time for Mr. Tipton and the Republicans to provide evidence this has happened.

      Voting for legislation based on a particular philosophy is fine but intentionally voting for legislation based on false or made-up facts makes those public officials who do so into fools.

      1. As the thread notes below it is actually cutting employee benefits.  Tipton is truly a moron but I suspect even he knows he's lying.  Buck was tweeting how he just voted to save seniors and people w/ disabilities SS, when in fact he just voted to make it easier to slash their benefits in the future.

        When the one party just outright lies abut the effects of what they are doing to the American people, what exactly should be the Dems' response?  

        To just (continually) acquiesces to the (new) shifting political 'reality,' to the 'truthiness' of the day, as the political world just lurches further and further toward the right side of the flat earth?   I honestly don't get how Tipton and Buck and the whole lot of them can just tell fibs straight up and people aren't out with the pitchforks, figuratively speaking of course.  

        Too many people out here in Tipton-land just gobble it up–its because of the EPA!  Obama!  Mexicans! TERRORISM!!!!!!!!!!!!  We must gut regulations that protect the environment, workers and public health!!  To defeat Putin!!!

    3. That article you sight to is nonsense. How do you explain the fact million, literally millions more, are now insured because of the President's healthcare legislation. Millions of those people are required to pay for their health insurance for the first time or a large part of it whereas, in the past, they just went to the emergency room which is very expensive and the rest of us picked-up the tab through increased cost that were going up around 16% each year. Annual increase in costs is now about 4% which is a 75% decrease and that has all happened because of President Obama's plan.

      President Obama's plan first gave people a way to obtain health insurance and secondly, it has forced people, because they are paying for it, to take responsibility for their healthcare and to manage that care (i.e. personal responsibility – I thought Republicans were all for that concept).

      And the great economy, well let's just assume that has had something to do with the reduced cost. President Obama has been in charge for six years. When he entered office we were loosing 800,000 jobs per month. He stanched the bleeding with his Stimulus package and then began the road to recovery and we are now creating jobs at a record pace (312,000 last month) and in the latest quarter (3rd quarter last year), the economy grew at an astounding 5% annual rate.

      What part did the Republicans play in all of this? They voted against all of it and now they want to destroy the very laws and budgets that put us back on the right track to economic recovery. The bottom line is obvious: The Democrats kept us out of a depression and led us back to prosperity. The Republican Party sat on itw hands and did nothing.

    5. New year, same old shit from you.

      The "job losses" that the ACA purportedly causes are not job losses–they result from people voluntarily leaving the job market because, due to the ACA, they can afford to purchase non-employer provided health insurance. That strikes me as a good thing, especially since those jobs don't disappear but are instead filled by another person.

      1. New year, and intelligent people are still expending time and effort trying to explain basic reality to the same clueless moron . . . 

        . . . nothing ever changes.

    1. Clearly you worship a false god.  Dr. Chaps will be by to perform an exorcism so that you can be baptized into the "Church of the Zero Rate on Capital Gains" faith.  Become a believer.  Jesus saves……at Bain Capital.

  5. There are a number of industries in the service area–hospitality, etc–that routinely keep workers at 32 hours. Why? So that if they call them in to work an additional shift to cover for an absent worker, they will not exceed 40 hours and have to pay overtime. The current scheduling practice is about avoiding overtime, not benefits (which many pay at 30 hours). This new plan just increases the incentive for businesses to keep workers below 40 hours, not encourage them to keep at 40 hours.

  6. My new Kaiser senior advantage plan CUTS the premium for me and my wife by $362 a month, with modestly higher copays.  My old employer, the denver post, attributed the change to OBama care.  Live long and prosper.

     

  7. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there ARE employers who limit their part-time employees to 29 hours per week to dodge the insurance requirement. Home Depot is one of them. When Obamacare kicked in, they kicked all of their part-time employees out of the health insurance plan (it was a pretty lousy plan anyway) and told them to go on Obamacare. At the same time, part-timers were limited to 29 hours per week, which meant a lot of people who had been working up to 35 hours per week not only lost their (lousy) health insurance but actually lost working hours as well.

    The theory being that employers who have cut employees' hours to fewer than 30 per week to "beat" the Obamacare mandate that employees cover full time workers. The problem is, there no real evidence that has happened, despite it being one of the most frequent claims leveled by Affordable Care Act detractors: – See more at: http://coloradopols.com/diary/66629/let-the-obamacare-games-begin#comments

    The theory being that employers who have cut employees' hours to fewer than 30 per week to "beat" the Obamacare mandate that employees cover full time workers. The problem is, there no real evidence that has happened, despite it being one of the most frequent claims leveled by Affordable Care Act detractors: – See more at: http://coloradopols.com/diary/66629/let-the-obamacare-games-begin#comments

      1. There's a silly script on this site that adds attribution to anything you highlight and copy.  Sometimes when you then paste that copied text into the text editor, the text is added, but "invisibly."

        There are a few ways to deal with this:

        1)  You can click on the text editor Source button to see the added stuff (it is there) and edit it

        2)  You can paste first into another program, then re-copy and paste from there into this site.

        3)  You can make sure to paste on an existing line of text before hitting return (pasting works differently if you've started a new paragraph with the site's editor) and then delete the "come see it at ColoradoPols!" link.

    2. That sucks, but anecdotes don't equal data. I'll avoid Home Depot now though.

      I assume you wouldn't want millions more full timers to suffer the same fate either way?

      1. Home Depot is the nation's largest home improvement store, and is #29 on the Fortune 500. That's not an anecdote. That's 20,000 part-time employees who lost their health insurance and got shipped off to the Affordable Care Act, assuming that they could afford it (and a lot couldn't, including me).
         

    3. Home Depot's move also proves, though, that some companies will do anything at any level to avoid paying their employees benefits.

      Set the level to 40 hours and Home Depot will restore those hours – up to 35 – and still deny healthcare benefits. The goal of the ACA was to make everyone involved in health insurance responsible in some way. Individuals get mandates. Employers get mandates. Insurance companies get tighter regulation. And so on. The current ACA limit, and the one passed by the House, do not reflect that goal adequately.

      1. Another good reason why insurance shouldn't be connected to employers. If we had national insurance, such as universal Medicare, there would be no need to take insurance issues into consideration when determining the number of hours employees should work and nobody's insurance coverage would be subject to an employer's religious beliefs. If employers wanted to offer supplementary insurance with more bells and whistles as a benefit they could do so but they wouldn't be obligated to involve themselves in their employees healthcare and their employees wouldn't be dependent on them for basic quality coverag

        That way we could all join the rest of the modern industrialized 21st century world where everyone has access to quality healthcare. Then maybe we could start working on joining in providing universal quality education, both vocational and via the university route. Who knows? We might even join the 21st century as a nation in which there is no political party whose presidential hopefuls don't dare to raise their hands when asked if they accept basic science because no educated grown up would expect anything else.  It would be nice to be number one, or even in the top ten, in something other than the ability to blow stuff up and the size of the income gap between CEOs and the people who work for them. 

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