Heres the background. The Affordable Care Act requires companies with 50 or more employees to provide affordable health insurance to 95 percent of their full-time workers or pay a fine. This regulation, known as the employer mandate, goes into effect this year. Heres the catch: The law defines employees who work 30 or more hours per week as full time. The legislation that House Republicans are expected to bring to the floor this week would change the definition of full time to 40 hours per week for purposes of the law. ... I call this the send people home a half hour early on Friday and deny them health insurance bill, says Tim Jost, a health care law scholar at the Washington and Lee University School of Law who has consulted with the Obama administration on implementation of the Affordable Care Act. ... Raising the threshold to 40 hours would place more than five times as many workers at risk of having their hours reduced, Paul van de Water, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, wrote in 2013. If Obama approves the 40-hour legislation, a half million workers could lose health insurance entirely, according to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office. And up to a million people could be moved into Medicaid or the health exchanges created by Obamacare, increasing the federal deficit by $73.7 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 18:39:41 +0000
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