What we've been Tweeting

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Tweets:

Provisions to make #ObamaCare more affordable are being unfairly derided as loopholes.


Don’t confuse savings designed to make #ObamaCare more affordable with saving designed to make healthcare more affordable.

We’ve written previously about how ObamaCare has created perverse incentives to force employers to take actions that work against its' employees’ best economic and healthcare interests.

Here are the money paragraphs from The American Interest article regarding how adjunct professors at certain colleges are getting the shaft because of the new healthcare law:

A new piece in the Wall Street Journal reports that many colleges are cutting back on the number of hours worked by adjunct professors, in order to avoid new requirements that they provide healthcare to anyone working over 30 hours per week. This is terrible news for a lot of people; 70 percent of professors work as adjuncts and many will now have to cope with a major pay cut just as requirements that they buy their own health insurance go into effect:

In Ohio, instructor Robert Balla faces a new cap on the number of hours he can teach at Stark State College. In a Dec. 6 letter, the North Canton school told him that “in order to avoid penalties under the Affordable Care Act… employees with part-time or adjunct status will not be assigned more than an average of 29 hours per week.”

Mr. Balla, a 41-year-old father of two, had taught seven English composition classes last semester, split between Stark State and two other area schools. This semester, his course load at Stark State is down to one instead of two as a result of the school’s new limit on hours, cutting his salary by about a total of $2,000.
Stark State’s move came as a blow to Mr. Balla, who said he earns about $40,000 a year and cannot afford health insurance.

“I think it goes against the spirit of the [health-care] law,” Mr. Balla said. “In education, we’re working for the public good, we are public employees at a public institution; we should be the first ones to uphold the law, to set the example.”

Because of what he makes, healthcare insurance for he and his family is out of reach and now with his hours being cut back, healthcare is just that more out of reach. How does that make any sense for a law called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? Well, it doesn’t precisely because of the provisions built into ObamaCare to keep the cost of ObamaCare down.

As we suggested in our Tweet: don’t confuse attempting to control the cost of the politically-driven healthcare law with actually trying to control the costs of healthcare for individuals and families. The two are totally separate goals and as we are seeing, should not be seen as one in the same.

Also, the article suggested these are loopholes to be exploited by employers so that they can somehow extricate themselves from the more onerous portions of the law? Nonsense. As the saying goes, these are features, not bugs.

ObamaCare could not achieve its stated goal without having built-in “outs” for employers as the people who wrote the legislation had enough sense to know that small businesses and, in this instance, colleges would not be able to afford the additional mandates required by ObamaCare for all of their employees.

As it stands, ObamaCare is giving the shaft to those near-full employment employees who are seeing their hours being cut back thus combining less take-home pay with the security of health insurance for their families being that much more out of reach.

The statist-left can bitch and moan all they want about for-profit companies like Darden Foods (owners of Red Robin and Olive Garden, among others) trying to maximize their profits by “skirting” ObamaCare provisions but now not-for-profit industries like education are facing the same cold hard realities and are behaving in exactly the same, rational manner.

At the end of the day, we are even questioning the term “unintended consequences” with respect to this law as when you take a close look at how it was written (something that, of course, Nancy Pelosi famously admitted to not doing), the law is producing the exact results as intended.

There is no great mystery about this as we are finding out as the ObamaCare implementation roll-out continues and we see just how much havoc this will wreak on peoples’ healthcare and the economy as a whole.

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