January 08, 2015 03:11 PM UTC

Let The Obamacare Games Begin!

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• by: Colorado Pols

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.