Many cash-strapped cities and counties facing the prospect of shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars in new health-care costs under the Affordable Care Act are opting instead to reduce the number of hours their part-time employees work.
The decisions to cut employee hours come 16 months before employers -- including state and local governments -- will be required to offer health care coverage to employees who work at least 30 hours a week. Some local officials said the cuts are happening now either because of labor contracts that must be negotiated in advance, or because the local governments worry that employees who work at least 30 hours in the months leading up to the January 2015 implementation date would need to be included in their health-care plans.
On Tuesday, Middletown Township, New Jersey said it would reduce the hours of 25 part-time workers in order to avoid up to $775,000 in increased annual health-care costs. Earlier this month, Bee County, Tex., said it would limit its part-time workers to 24 hours per week when the new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1. I bet all those affected voted for Bumble.....multiple times....
Last month, department heads in Brevard County, Fla., were told to plan similar cuts in advance of the 2015 deadline. Brevard County Insurance Director Jerry Visco estimated the new mandate would cost the county $10,000 per part-time employee -- or $1.38 million a year if all 138 part-time employees who work more than 30 hours a week are covered, he told Florida Today. The Brevard County libraries have already cut hours for 37 employees.
"It's not something we prefer to do, but the cost of health insurance is significant and would really impact municipal budgets," said Anthony Mercantante, Middletown's township administrator. "It's not something we can take on, particularly when we don't know some of the other ramifications of the Affordable Care Act. There are far more questions than answers right now."
Middletown spends about $9 million a year, out of its $65 million budget, on employee health policies, Mercantante said.
Elsewhere, Lynchburg, Va. administrators have cut hours for 35 to 40 part-time employees. Chesterfield County, just south of Richmond, is likely to cut the hours of "several hundred" employees, the county director of human resources told the Richmond Times-Dispatch earlier this year. Chippewa County, Wisc., will drop 15 part-time positions to avoid up to $163,000 in annual health care costs, the county administrator told Wisconsin Public Radio in April.
In a statement provided to GovBeat, White House Council of Economic Advisors chairman Jason Furman said there is no evidence that the Affordable Care Act is incentivizing employers to add part-time rather than full-time positions.
"Since the ACA became law, nearly 90% of the gain in employment has been in full-time positions. Furthermore, the law is helping make health insurance coverage more affordable which supports job growth," Furman said. "Just yesterday, we learned that the growth in employers' health care premiums has slowed significantly recently, to less than a third of the growth rate in the late '90s and early 2000s."
Other supporters of the law suggested the cuts could actually cost counties and cities more money than if they simply paid for part-time workers' health care costs.
"There are some costs of doing business where it really does cost you more money to have multiple people on the job," said Gary Burtless, a senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institute. "Why would you create more jobs than you need to at 20 hours a week, when if you're really responding to the Affordable Care Act you would assign people to work 29 hours a week?"
"I don't think this is going to be a big direct-cost burden for counties and municipalities," Burtless added.
Mercantante, the Middletown administrator, says it's the uncertainty that's driving his town's actions. "Towns are going to have to start looking at different types of health care packages to offer to people given the new mandates, but I can't tell you what those are going to be or how much they're going to cost us," he said.
#4
Cool. Cut some government employees, preferably the crappy ones who don't pull their weight anyway. My guess is that we could accomplish the same amount of work with fewer, higher quality employees + reasonable eGovernment and not skip a beat. In this 'sequester age', states and local governments have already shown amazing adaptability, doing more with less money and even competing with other jurisdictions over who can do the best job. I wish the Federal government had the same constraints that state and local government did (inability to run/finance deficits) as a way of focusing Washington's fucking greed. It's hard to see what they're doing as anything other than a giant China-financed Ponzi scheme that keeps us lemmings sucking from the teat. Obamacare is just another teat, this time with chocolate *and* strawberries. Mmmm, tasty.
Posted by: Muggsy the Full Bosomed1713 ||
08/23/2013 16:21 Comments ||
Top||
#5
More part time workers = fewer people with healthcare = crisis = more federal intervention = single payer.
You can just see our mighty future OWG + NAU, etc. rolling in $$$, just waiting to hand it out to Member-States + their electoral constituents.
Oh wait ...no one in Amerika has any $$$ because it is our righteous Globie duty to hand over 75-100% of our personal income(s) to the Govt. like the Frenchies wanna do.
GOVT = WASHINGTON, DC = NATIONAL-GOVT-VS-GLOBALIST/NAU-ETC-GOVT???
Give our $$$ to the National Fed, Regional Fed, Trans-Regional Fed, Continental Fed or the OWG/Globalist Fed???
Space Fed???
[WELCOME BACK KOTTER'S VINNY "I'M SOOO CONFUSED" BARBARINO here].
#3
The United States is 3rd in Murders throughout the World.
But if you take out Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, and New Orleans, the United States is 4th from the Bottom for Murders. These 4 Cities also have the toughest Gun Control Laws in the United States .
ALL 4 Cities are controlled by Democrats. It would be absurd to draw any conclusions from this data
#4
I too am against illegal guns, and agree that they should be removed from the hands of criminals.
The problem is that Bloomberg wants to make all guns illegal, and turn all gun owners into criminals.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
08/23/2013 14:36 Comments ||
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#5
I have an idea as a show of good intention.
There is a database already of gang bangers and mobsters. Go check on them. No? Hokay, then go park your silly bus in a bad neighborhood, go knocking door to door and tell them to surrender their weapons because utopia has arrived. Hand out some FAIL slips.
Go on TV and bash the BATF for arming a battalion of meth dealers, slave traders, and assassins.
Best yet, go home. You can't be trusted with your own lists.
[Washington Times] HONOLULU Democrats are urging President Obama to bypass Capitol Hill once again and accomplish by executive order what Congress refused to do for 13 years: grant formal federal tribal recognition to Native Hawaiians. Haole's go home! These are our islands.
#5
They want it, give it to them, we can take a star off or let Northern Colorado take their star on the flag. Cut them loose and make them a foreign country with no aid, no federal interest and nothing to do with America. I promise China will control it inside of 5 years.
#6
Only if we liquidate Hawai'i's statehood (and with it, the two sitting Senators) and give the islands back to the heirs of the previous monarchy. I'm sure Quentin Kawānanakoa would love the chance to go swanning about at Turtle Bay.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
08/23/2013 16:22 Comments ||
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#7
They want something where whites won't have any rights but they can still send Democrat reps to DC.
#8
D *** NG, does China + PLA know - after all, ITS THEIR HAWAII TOO [in time]???
Prolly safe to say ditto for the future sovereign REPUBLIC OF AZTLAN, since its STILL NOT clear at this time which 1/2 of CONUS-NORAM China desires eventual for "living space".
CHINA'S "LONG MARCH" TO FUTURE MEXIMERIKA - OR TWAS IT ISLAMERIKA???
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
