SO I am sure this is not original and others have said the same, but I was bored so I figured I'd share for those unaware.
A rec'd diary today talked about how the news of employers cutting people to part time to avoid paying for their healthcare is overstated, and that relatively few will be affected. But I have a couple friends who have already seen their hours be cut below 30 here in California. And I think this is the result of a HUGE oversight that could easily be fixed in the way I describe below, if only we had a Congress willing to work to improve the law.
So, as you probably are aware, Obamacare calculates whether or not you have 50 or more employees by using a simple equation for "full-time equivalents". This gets away from employers arguing that they do not have 50 "full-timers" by hiring 100 part timers or whatever.
Essentially, how it works is that they add up the total hours worked on average per week by all employees (say for the sake of simple explanation, 4,000 hours) and then divide it by whatever is considered full-time (in this case 40 hours per week).
So a company (let's call it X) which has employees averaging 4,000 hours worked per week has 100 full-time equivalents , and would thus fall under Obamacare's employer mandate, which requires employers that have 50 or more full-time equivalents (FTEs from here on out because I am tired of typing) to provide healthcare to individual full-time workers.
Those last few words are the problem. Individual Full-Time workers.
So even though the FTE measurement is used to count how many workers you have for purposes of the law, it is NOT used to measure how many you need to cover as full-time workers, and instead allows employers who want to be greedy assholes a way out.
And it is negatively influencing my friends, causing them to understandably turn against the law as a whole.
The simple fix, is to make FTEs the measurement for how many employees you must cover, REGARDLESS of part time/ full time status.
So lets take our hypothetical company X with 4,000 hours per week worked again.
The calculation we did found that they had 100 full-time equivalents. But right now X, to avoid paying for healthcare, can hire another 100 employees, and have 200 workers each working 20 hours per week and avoid the law.
Their FTE number did NOT change, it is still 100. (Because they are still totaling 4,000 hours a week, just using twice as many employees working half as many hours each).
So, change the law to make the FTE the SAME number of employees that must be covered.
If company X has 100 FTEs, they MUST INSURE at minimum 100 workers. Period. If that means they have 200 part-timers, half of those part-timers must be insured.
I feel this would encourage companies to NOT cut hours and actually encourage them give their employees more hours. It would close this giant gaping loophole that should not have existed in the first place.
Anyway, it is probably a moot point since there is no way this Congress will work to do anything other than full repeal of Obamacare. Improvements are not going to happen.
At this point, perhaps the better solution is for the administration to just not enforce the mandate at all ever (until the law was changed in a future more productive congress), and let those people onto the exchanges instead. That would be more expensive probably, but at least then Company X can't screw over its employees by making them all work 28 hours a week instead of 40.
My apologies if any of my math was off, or if I am bad at explaining things. Like I said, I am sure this isn't original at all, but I figured I'd post it. Cheers.