A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation Wednesday that would change the definition of “full-time employment” under Obamacare from 30 hours or more a week to 40 hours or more. The senators argued that the current definition is causing businesses to cut back the hours they give employees to avoid the law’s mandates, hurting those workers.
A companion bill is set to be voted on in the House soon, possibly Thursday.
The Affordable Care Act requires businesses that employ 50 or more full-time employees to provide them with healthcare. The law considers anyone who works an average of at least 30 hours a week to be full time. The provision was included to keep employers from circumventing the requirement by giving some employees less than the standard 40-hour work week.
The Senate bill’s co-sponsors, Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; Joe Donnelly, D-Ind.; and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said the provision had resulted in an even more perverse incentive: to reduce employee hours to just 29 a week.
“From grocery store employees to school cafeteria managers to adjunct professors at colleges, part-time workers across many industries have seen their hours cut to comply with the healthcare law,” Donnelly said.
Collins said the concerns were not hypothetical: “[M]ore than 450 employers have already cut work hours or staffing levels in response to the law as of September 2013. Employees of for-profit businesses are not the only ones who are threatened by this illogical definition of full-time work,” she said. Collins was citing data first reported last September by Investor’s Business Daily, which analyzed Labor Department data.
Collins and Donnelly previously introduced the legislation in the last Congress.
The bill will put some Democrats in a difficult position, forcing them to choose between local and state businesses that say the Obamacare mandate is squeezing them and the White House, which does not want to see a part of President Obama’s signature initiative undone.
The White House said Tuesday it would veto any such legislation. Spokesman Josh Earnest said, in reaction to the House version, that it would make it easier for businesses to avoid the 50-employee requirement. “This proposed change would actually do a lot of harm, not just to the Affordable Care Act but to a substantial number of workers across the country,” Earnest said.
The issue has been fiercely debated by conservative policy analysts, with some taking the White House’s side that changing the requirement to 40 hours would result in too many more workers being put at risk of losing their employer-based healthcare coverage.
David Hogberg, health policy analyst for the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research, said he was “on the fence” regarding the issue, since he questioned whether the change would have much impact at all.
“About 99 percent of employers with 200 or more employees offer insurance. Presumably those companies provide health insurance because the employees provide enough value to make it worth it. So would lifting the employer mandate to 40 hours really change the value those employees provide?” he asked.
