Obamacare Update

When your legislative body doesn’t read legislation before it votes on it, you get “breaking news” more than a year after the vote.

It took media researchers until nearly the end of June 2012 to find the 7 new taxes on middle income Americans included in the bill.

And now, just the end of last week they found a clause that changes how many hours an employee has to work in order to be considered “working full-time”, according to Obamacare.

The regulations, written by an IRS attorney, arbitrarily redefine “full time employee” as someone who works 30 hours a week for a business. Traditionally, most private businesses have defined “full time employee” as someone who works 40 hours a week. With this new regulation, the federal government is now removing the right of businesses to define “full time employee” as they deem appropriate for their unique conditions.

This new rule does this so that “more people” will be made eligible for mandatory employer provided health insurance. Sadly, even I can see that this rule is going to work exactly the opposite direction of its intentions.

Say you’re working a part-time job of 30-35 hours a week. You’re possibly able to hold down the fort with this gig, but you’re not making a single inch of headway. Or, maybe its not even keeping you above water. Well, thanks to Obamacare, your employer now has to provide you with medical insurance or face federally imposed fines. Now your job has been reduced to 25-28 hours a week and you’re definitely back to falling behind.

Or, maybe they don’t cut your hours. This now means that you are costing your employer more money, and since your employer is like every other employer and does not have a magic money tree they can use to pay your health insurance premiums with (unlike the employer known as federal government), someone, or more likely a group of “someones”, aren’t going to get as large a raise this year (if they get one at all).

Another option is that or your employer is going to have to increase prices of their product or service, possibly losing business in the long run.

Doesn’t that sound like fun!

Or, I suppose that your employer might be one of the 1200+ businesses who applied for (read: greased bureaucratic palms) and received an HHS waiver. In which case, you’re still screwed because your employer is an Obamanation lackey.

And since we’re talking about the Obamanation, you probably didn’t hear about this because our Chief Executive has the foreign policy chops of Jimmeh Cahtah, but the House Republicans have approved a bill that will voodoo away the waivers that Obama Executive Ordered into existence which give the states leeway to gut welfare requirements.

The bad news is that this process could take until January because the Senate is going to pretend to not notice it for a month or so AFTER coming back from their recess.

Meanwhile….

Awww shit.