Toddsterpatriot
Diamond Member
Yes, it spends money. It kicks about a million people off of their employer-based health insurance.
How does their bill kick people off their employer policy?
Good lord. Let me explain the rationale for this GOP legislation to you. Under the ACA, employers of a certain size have to make an offer of insurance coverage to full-time employees. Insomuch as there's a distinction between "part-time" and "full-time" employees, that means there's a threshold: employees above that threshold need to be offered coverage, employees below it do not. The ACA establishes that threshold at 30 hours of work a week.
The existence of such a threshold will affect employer behavior. There will be a temptation to lower the hours of workers who are hovering around that threshold, to take them out of the equation when it comes to dealing with the employer mandate.
Clear so far?
The GOP wants to look like it's at least trying to do something about this. The obvious thing to do if you believe a threshold introduced by the law is changing employer behavior would be to remove the threshold. But for whatever reason, the GOP is not proposing to do that. Instead, they're proposing to move the threshold. From 30 hours to 40 hours a week.
But insofar as that threshold represents a perverse incentive, it affects workers near the threshold. If the requirement is 30 hours, then someone working say 31-35 hours may find themselves shifted below 30 hours. You're not likely to see people going all the way from 40 hours a week to 29, the 30-hour threshold affects those whose hours are closer to it--as a result, the evidence suggests the threshold has affected the hours of a few hundred thousand people. In other words, right now the number of workers impacted by the threshold isn't really all that high.
Shifting the threshold from 30 hours to 40 hours means you shift the folks it affects (i.e., those near the threshold). And a lot, lot more people work near the 40 hour threshold than the 30 hour threshold. So whatever perverse incentive is built into having a threshold will be amplified if you apply it to a much larger group of workers, as the GOP's bill does.
If you agree with the premise of the bill that there's a problem here of workers near the threshold being shifted below it to deny them access to their employer's insurance coverage, then it should be fairly obvious that subjecting more workers to the effects of that threshold makes the problem worse, not better. Which is the case here. More people will be shifted below the threshold under the GOP bill (and thus out of their employer-based coverage) for the simple reason that more people's hours hover around 40 hours than 30 hours.
The ones who don't just become uninsured as a result are picked up by government-subsidized programs.Sounds like the government-subsidized programs are spending the $50 billion.
...yeah. Because the GOP's bill would have the effect of shifting more people into those programs.
Their "solution" doesn't match the problem they've diagnosed. That's the crux of the problem here. And it's why the costs of this bill far outweigh whatever benefits they're claiming are attached to it (which, again, I don't think they've even bothered to articulate).
That said, the GOP bill has at least been useful for illustrating why the ACA made the full-time threshold 30 hours instead of 40--it mutes the impact, and lessens the perverse incentive inherent in introducing such a threshold. In other words, 30 hours is better policy than 40 hours and the GOP is showing us why.
The existence of such a threshold will affect employer behavior. There will be a temptation to lower the hours of workers who are hovering around that threshold, to take them out of the equation when it comes to dealing with the employer mandate.
Wait, employers react negatively to a tax increase? Don't tell the liberals, it'll destroy their worldview.