Obamacare isn’t creating a massive wave of underemployed workers, one of the ominous predictions Republicans have long made about President Obama’s signature healthcare law.
That’s according to research published Tuesday in the journal Health Affairs, which found no significant change in the number of part-time workers after the law’s employer mandate to offer full-time employees with affordable health coverage began.
How the Affordable Care Act would affect employees’ hours has been a touchy political subject, as it requires mid-size and large employers to offer health benefits to full-time workers for the first time. Under the law, full-time workers are defined as those working at least 30 hours a week.
While Republicans have tried repeatedly to ditch the mandate, even some Democrats have backed increasing its definition of full-time work to 40 hours, prompted by fears that it would cause employers to cut back workers’ hours to 29 hours, just below the current threshold.
But if the law were actually incentivizing employers to cut workers below 30 hours a week, there presumably would be an increase in those working 25-29 hours a week or less, researchers at Indiana University and Harvard wrote.
When they examined data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, they found no such bump in 2015. The researchers did find a small increase, about 0.18 percent, when they looked at data from 2014, but that trend had begun before the healthcare law was passed, they wrote.
“We found little evidence that the ACA had caused increases in part-time employment as of 2015,” they concluded.
There was a caveat to the study, however. Because of a delay enacted by the Obama administration, the mandate applied only to companies with more than 100 workers last year. Because the mandate was expected to have a larger effect on businesses with 50-100 workers, who are subject to the mandate as of 2016, its full impact may not yet be known.
Still, the study is likely to supply Democrats with evidence that some of Obamacare’s negative effects predicted by Republicans haven’t panned out as expected.
