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"Marisol works 29 hours at each of her jobs. This is common. If an employee works more hours, her employer is required to provide health insurance." This is ju

"Marisol works 29 hours at each of her jobs. This is common. If an employee works more hours, her employer is required to provide health insurance." This is just one example of how poorly drafted the Affordable Care Act is. The lobbyists who wrote the bill (remember, the President provided almost no leadership on the detailed provisions of the bill while it was in Congress) ignored the certainty of elasticity of demand for labor by employers. If it becomes more expensive to provide full-time employment, because of a mandate to provide health insurance to full-time employees, then employers will offer fewer full-time jobs and more part-time jobs with few enough hours not to trigger the health insurance mandate. The drafters of the Affordable Care Act forgot Economics 101, or maybe never learned economics at all. "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."

extra88 12y ago
Or they knew exactly what would happen but went with it anyway so they'd have a bill that would actually get through the Senate. If you assume employer-provided insurance (which is bad but what the U.S. has), what's the alternative? Any part-time number you pick, some employers will schedule people just below it so if someone works even one hour, they get covered? How do you then sort out which of multiple employers actually provides insurance? Short-sighted, penny-pinching employers will always look for a loophole, if they couldn't get out of it by reducing hours, they'd do something like call each worker a "contractor" and not employee.
- fulafel 12y ago
  To answer the "How would you you...", you enable the employee to sue if they are artificially given less than full work-hours. It's not a hard thing to prove if there's a nontrivial part time work force. These being the odds, the companies don't try to pull it off too often, even if the court cases would mostly come from ex-workers.

extra88 12y ago

Or they knew exactly what would happen but went with it anyway so they'd have a bill that would actually get through the Senate. If you assume employer-provided insurance (which is bad but what the U.S. has), what's the alternative? Any part-time number you pick, some employers will schedule people just below it so if someone works even one hour, they get covered? How do you then sort out which of multiple employers actually provides insurance? Short-sighted, penny-pinching employers will always look for a loophole, if they couldn't get out of it by reducing hours, they'd do something like call each worker a "contractor" and not employee.

fulafel 12y ago
To answer the "How would you you...", you enable the employee to sue if they are artificially given less than full work-hours. It's not a hard thing to prove if there's a nontrivial part time work force. These being the odds, the companies don't try to pull it off too often, even if the court cases would mostly come from ex-workers.