Is it any wonder that Democrats, especially the 14 Senate Democrats that voted for Obamacare, are worried and concerned about the political price they will pay for the Obamacare "train wreck," when we see the cost to workers across the country, day after day, article after article and study after study?
LA Times discusses just one of the consequences of the law:
Many part-timers are facing a double whammy from President Obama's Affordable Care Act.
The law requires large employers offering health insurance to include part-time employees working 30 hours a week or more. But rather than provide healthcare to more workers, a growing number of employers are cutting back employee hours instead.
The result: Not only will these workers earn less money, but they'll also miss out on health insurance at work.
Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year, and that extra expense would trigger layoffs and cutbacks in city services.
The Obamacare law has put employers like the City of Long Beach between a rock and a hard place... either cut hours of workers, leaving them with no healthcare as before, but also unable to pay their bills because now they have less hours, less money coming into their homes via their paycheck, or end up leaving workers completely jobless and cutting city services geared to helping the poor.
For businesses in almost every industry that employes part-time workers, they face the same type of choice, cut hours leaving people with less pay or risk having to leave other employees completely jobless because of the money the Obamacare law will force them to spend otherwise.
More:
Across the nation, hundreds of thousands of other hourly workers may also see smaller paychecks in the coming year because of this response to the federal healthcare law. The law exempts businesses with fewer than 50 full-time workers from this requirement to provide benefits.
But big restaurant chains, retailers and movie theaters are starting to trim employee hours. Even colleges are reducing courses for part-time professors to keep their hours down and avoid paying for their health premiums.
Overall, an estimated 2.3 million workers nationwide, including 240,000 in California, are at risk of losing hours as employers adjust to the new math of workplace benefits, according to research by UC Berkeley. All this comes at a time when part-timers are being hired in greater numbers as U.S. employers look to keep payrolls lean.
Despite claims to the contrary by Democrats, coverage isn't "free" and contradicting Obama's assertion that there will be just "bumps and glitches", or Harry Reid's determination that throwing more taxpayer money at this monstrosity will magically cure everything, the damage being done to the economy, workers, businesses, and states will be felt for decades to come.
This will, indeed, be Obama's legacy.
