Government Gong Show - Obamacare mandate could phase out full-time work + video

As a person with multiple sclerosis, I watch the healthcare scene closely.

My wife, Sharon, received a phone call yesterday from a friend who works for a national retail food establishment.  The friend was excited because she was pregnant.  However, she said all employees had been cut back to part-time so she no longer has health insurance.  Obamacare is responsible, as this article explains:

President Obama’s health care reform is prompting employers to hire more part-time and temporary workers to escape paying benefits under a mandate that goes into effect next year, amplifying a trend toward transient employment that took hold during the recession, according to a growing number of economic indicators. Hardest hit by the move toward cutting work hours and increasing temporary hiring are lower-income workers, millions of whom already lack health insurance and are afflicted with constant turnover in jobs at fast-food restaurants, big-box retailers and other businesses with large numbers of low-paid staff.

Monthly reports from the Labor Department show a rising trend of temporary hiring and still-elevated levels of part-time workers, though the recession officially ended four years ago this month. Economists say the looming Jan. 1 deadline for providing health insurance to all full-time workers may be the reason why. The mandate applies to companies employing more than 50 people who work 30 or more hours per week.

“The increased use of temp workers may lead to more permanent hiring, but there is also the possibility that employers are taking on more temp workers to keep payrolls under the threshold of 50 workers and thus to remain free from the requirements of the Affordable Care Act,” said Sophia Koropeckyj, managing director at Moody's Analytics. Temporary jobs have grown far faster than the overall job market, with the total temporary workforce reaching pre-recession levels of more than 26 million this year and surging noticeably in recent months.

And it's not just the private sector responding to the Obamacare mandates:

The pressures are cutting the hours even of those who already work part time. Officials in Floyd County, Ind., announced last week plans to pare back the hours of part-time county workers who now work 34 hours a week to get them under the 30-hour-a-week Obamacare mandate. The Southern Lehigh School District in Pennsylvania voted to cut the hours of 51 part-time secretaries, custodians and cafeteria workers to avoid the health care mandate.

So who gets hurt the most by Obamacare?

Ball State University economist Michael Hicks said the trend to reduce hours is hurting the same uneducated and unskilled workers who suffered the most during the recession and have been getting an ever-smaller piece of the income and benefits pie for decades. More educated, higher-income workers already have health care benefits from their employers, by and large, and the law is not expected to have as much effect on them, he said.

“The incentives shift to hire higher-income workers full time and low-income workers part time” because health care costs are largely the same per person but constitute a much smaller share of compensation costs with workers earning higher wages, he said. “Employment opportunities for college graduates will continue to expand, but the share of part-time employment will also grow” among the most hard-pressed workers with less education, he said.

“Right now there’s a great deal of anecdotal evidence the ACA is promoting a shift from full- to part-time employment,” he said. “At some point in the coming months, we’ll have more certainty from the data” as employers who are cutting work hours to escape the mandate will do so in a mass rush before the Jan. 1 deadline, he said.

So those who Obamacare was supposed to help, low income workers and the poor, are the ones who are hurt the most.  This is typical of most gov't interventions in the economy, but is brought home for all to see with Obamacare.  Federal programs and regulations had already screwed up our healthcare system and Obamacare will further damage what's left.

What's next?  This will follow the usual pattern where gov't will initiate new programs, regulations and mandates to "fix" the problems caused by them in the first place.

In other words, the Government Gong Show is just beginning.

For those of you not old enough to have seen The Gong Show on tv, here's an example of the quality of your future healthcare:


http://youtu.be/C8Z5b6w97Cw