The Obamacare Effect

By Tom Quiner

You must provide your employees with health insurance or be fined.

This was the big idea of Obamacare, the employer mandate. If you employ 50 or more full time workers, you must provide them with gold-plated coverage beginning January 1st, 2014, since extended a year to 2015.

Many argued that this was an overreach by the federal government, but the Supreme Court upheld this provision of Obamacare.

Despite candidate Obama’s promise that his plan would decrease the price of health insurance by an average of $2500 per person, the exact opposite has occurred. Health insurance premiums have skyrocketed. They are expected to go much higher when Obamacare is fully implemented.

For the sake of economic survival, businesses have had to begin scaling back their workforce in a variety of ways.

They aren’t hiring, so the unemployment rate remains high at 7.6%, well above the typical rate during an economic recovery. But that doesn’t begin to tell the story.

Businesses are cutting back the hours they offer their employees to avoid paying health insurance and other benefits. That’s why involuntary part-time jobs increased by 322,000 last month. We are seeing an increase in part time jobs at the same time we are seeing a decline in full time jobs.

So when you hear the Obama administration cheering 160,000 new jobs created last month, you should know that 486,000 of them were part time, which means that 326,000 full time jobs were lost.

This is the Obamacare Effect: a shift from full time to part time employment.

Perhaps this explains the administration’s decision to wait a year before enforcing the employer mandate. They may want to slow the economic carnage of their policies until after 2014’s midterm elections.

In the meantime, we have 8,226,000 people who have part time work, but want full time work.

The Obamacare Effect gives them good reason to remain pessimistic about their chances.