So, with Obamacare coming in, some US companies are cutting working hours.
With Medicaid eligibility about to be expanded in some 30 states, as a result of the Affordable Care Act, Wal-Mart has responded by cutting employee hours—and thereby wages—even further in order to push more of their workers into state Medicaid programs and increase Wal-Mart profits. Good news for Wal-Mart shareholders and senior management earning the big bucks—not so good for the taxpayers who will now be expected to contribute even larger amounts of money to subsidize Wal-Mart’s burgeoning profits.
Because you pay a fine if your full time (over 30 hours I think it is) employees don\’t have health insurance. So, make everyone a part time worker. Perhapos it\’s not very nice but it was forseeable but they wronte the law this way anyway.
The solution is?
Legislation is now making its way through the California legislature—with the support of consumer groups, unions and, interestingly, physicians—that would levy a fine of up to $6,000 on employers like Wal-Mart for every full-time employee that ends up on the state’s Medi-Cal program—the California incarnation of Medicaid.
Eh?
The supposed problem is that people are being offered part time work: how does anything at all about full timers change that?
This is an odd law. It should penalise Walmart if it drops employees into medicaid, but doesnt appear to penalise them if they hire them directly into part time and thus medicaided positions. It basically means fewer promotions for part time workers.
Basically all it tells us is that Obamacare is nuts. Which we already knew. What the Americans need is some form of national socialised healthcare.
Yeah because a federal government that sucks at running Medicare Medicaid and the veterans administration should be allowed to run everybody’s health care.
Sounds like it would also mean full time workers who would like their hours reduced will get fired.
Are you sure this is California and not France? This is the kind of stupidity that Hollande would come up with. What next on the West Coast, 100+% taxation?
Shut up! Blue Eyes!
You’ll give them ideas. (And it’s well bad enough already, believe me.)
An ‘unintended’ consequence requiring an even more stupid law which will generate more ‘unintended’ consequences which will need…
Must be wonderful to be a lawmaker.
“Excuse me sir, you’ve fucked up”
“Then I shall make a law such that my fuck up is no longer a fuck up”
“Excuse me sir, you’ve fucked up”
“Then I shall…
Well, you get he idea.
A lefty journalist recently did a series on the wickedness of supermarkets.
They will hire you part time at 29 hours per week. That’s not a living wage! And they get 600 – 700 cvs per job opening!
And, scandalously, they allow the employees to organise their shift rota among themselves! So that they can pick up their kids from school and deprive nounous of jobs.
And they’ll get a nice letter of recommendation, if they are any good, from Carrefour so they can get a part time weekend job serving in a restaurant or something that needs part time workers.
The interviewer from France Culture was positively slavering to get even more scandalous revelations about the exploitation of the workers.
I have seen somewhere that the bronze level of family insurance under Obamacare is $20,000 a year.