House Ways & Means Chairman Kevin Brady suggested Tuesday that the House won’t have enough time this week to vote on a bill that delays or repeals key parts of Obamacare, meaning that the legislation won’t be passed until after the midterm elections.
Brady told reporters at the Capitol that a recess in the House due to Hurricane Florence could mean the Save American Workers Act of 2018 will not be considered until a lame duck session of Congress after the 2018 midterm elections. The House is expected to recess after this week for the whole month of October to give members more time to campaign before the elections in early November.
“I think with Hurricane Florence knocking some days of the calendar I think timing got the better of the process,” Brady said. “I expect those bills to come to the floor if not this week then when we return.”
He said that he hopes to have the bill to President Trump’s desk before the end of the year.
The bill would change Obamacare’s definition of a “full-time” work from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week.
The goal is to ensure that businesses don’t have to pay Obamacare’s employer mandate penalty for not providing health insurance to workers. By changing the definition, it could lead to more businesses avoiding the penalty because they would have fewer full-time employees than under the current definition.
Enforcement of the individual mandate for businesses that have 50 or more full-time employees has been delayed several times.
Employers who have 100 or more full-time employers had to pay the penalty starting in 2015. However, the federal government has not collected any financial penalties from businesses that violated the mandate.
The bill would also ensure that businesses that violated the mandate from 2015 to 2018 would not have to pay the penalty.
The tax reform law that was passed last year repealed starting in 2019 the financial penalty for Obamacare’s individual mandate for everyone to get health insurance.
The bill also delays a “Cadillac” tax on high-cost health plans until 2023. Obamacare created the 40 percent excise tax on generous health insurance plans, but the tax has never gone into effect.
It also would fully repeal Obamacare’s “tanning” tax that levied a 10 percent tax on indoor tanning salons.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the bill would cost the federal government $51.6 billion over a decade.
