Sen. Lamar Alexander
In the first week on the job, House Republicans summarily passed legislation to
take health insurance away from full-time workers by changing the definition of full-time employment under Obamacare from 30 hours a week to 40. As the law stands, employers with 50 or more workers have to either provide insurance to 95 percent of their full-time employees or pay a fine. The Republican argument is that this means employers will just cut hours for those employees to avoid the mandate. They're trying to make the case that this wouldn't happen to people now working 40 hours a week.
Senate Republicans, however, don't quite have the luxury dictatorial control over their body, so they had to go the traditional, mostly democratic route of having a real committee hearing on the proposed legislation. And it didn't go so great for them.
[Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the new chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee] and Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, one of the co-sponsors of the 40-hour measure, invited a trio of witnesses to testify for their side: Doug Holtz-Eakin, the former CBO director and economic adviser to John McCain’s 2012 campaign; Andrew Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants (Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.), and Betsy Webb, the school superintendent in Bangor, Maine.
Puzder and Webb were in a tough spot: They were there to talk about how onerous the 30-hour workweek definition was for their enterprises, but what that really meant was having to explain why they were not providing health coverage to so many of their workers. This task was made more difficult by the contrast with the Democrats’ lone witness—Joe Fugere, the owner of a small pizzeria chain in Seattle who has, even before the passage of Obamacare, offered generous benefits to any of his employees working more than 24 hours a week. […]
The Democrats on the panel, in the minority for the first time in eight years, relished cross-examining the Republicans’ witnesses. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the panel’s top Democrat, noted that Puzder’s claim—that Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. workers who did not get coverage at work could get Obamacare coverage instead—did not hold up in the many states that have rejected the law’s Medicaid expansion. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts quoted Yuval Levin’s criticism of the 40-hour change and noted the irony that Republicans were pushing a measure that would both raise the deficit and make more people reliant on Obamacare. “This bill is corporate welfare,” she said. “Big corporations would be able to cut their coverage, and taxpayers would get stuck with the tab. I’m against adding $53 billion to the deficit so corporations can push their responsibilities onto the government.”
What happened then was fun. Puzder, the fast-food CEO (who made $4.48 million in 2012) attacked the CBO, asking "but have they ever estimated anything that is accurate?" With the former director of the CBO sitting right next to him. Even Alexander had to rebuke his own witness, reminding him that it was the CBO which helped fight a minimum wage increase when it estimated that it would kill lots of jobs. Alexander also had the problem of countering the strong opposition of several prominent conservative analysts, who oppose the bill because of its obvious flaw—changing the rule to 40 hours will likely cause even more workers to have their hours cut because there are far more people working 40 hours. Sen. Elizabeth Warren had fun with that one, pointing out that "[b]ig corporations would be able to cut their coverage, and taxpayers would get stuck with the tab."
All in all, things did not go swimmingly for Alexander, who only had Collins as back-up for most of the hearing. While Democrats attended in force, most Republicans didn't show up or only stayed for a short time. One Democrat, ranking committee member Sen. Patty Murray (WA), declare that it "was a very good hearing."