GOP-controlled Congress sets its sights on Obamacare

With Republicans now controlling both houses of Congress, President Barack Obama already is threatening to veto several bills likely to come his way soon. One of those would do away with the so-called 30-hour work week in the Affordable Care Act.

Under Obamacare’s employer mandate, companies must provide approved health insurance to workers who put in 30 hours a week—something relatively few employers were doing before the law was passed.

Critics say that rule has caused a lot of part-time employees to get only 29 hours of work each week. Republicans want to change the law, raising the minimum to 40 hours. It’s one of the first things on the agenda in the new GOP-controlled Senate.

The president has repeatedly promised to work with Republicans to improve his signature healthcare law, but this week White House spokesman Josh Earnest said doing away with the 30-hour work week is no improvement, and the president will veto any bill that does so.

“This proposed change would actually do a lot of harm, not just to the Affordable Care Act, but also to a substantial number of workers across the country,” Earnest said, insisting there’s no evidence that employers are reducing hours because of Obamacare.

“What’s clear is that the temptation that some employers might have would only be sweetened significantly if this Republican change … were to be put in place,” he said.

That is precisely the argument many conservatives have used to propose doing away with the provision altogether; any requirement gives employers an incentive to reduce the number of workers and hours. Several regional Federal Reserve banks have surveyed businesses to find out if the law is causing them to cut worker’s hours. Consistently, about 20 percent of employers say it is.

“Just as we don’t require employers to provide food and clothing and housing, we shouldn’t be requiring them to provide health insurance,” said Diana Furchgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute

Heartland Institute’s Sean Parnell said it’s not clear whether the administration anticipated employers would cut back hours, but “they’ve certainly demonstrated that they just don’t understand how the real economy works, what it’s like to run a business and meet a payroll and employ people.”

And that criticism, he said, also applies to the way the administration has handled the Medicaid component of Obamacare. The law encourages states to expand Medicaid coverage to millions of additional low-income individuals. In theory, that’s good.

“The problem is Medicaid is a fundamentally broken program that delivers really, really bad care in most cases and they’ve expanded that and made the existing problems even worse,” Parnell said. That’s because Medicaid, even more than Medicare, squeezes doctors with extremely low reimbursements for treating patients. Anywhere from one-third to one-half of doctors in the country won’t see Medicaid patients.

“You can’t expect to pay somebody less than the cost of treatment to see Medicaid patients and then expect them to open their doors to any and all Medicaid patients,” Parnell said.

Another group having trouble with doctor appointments turns out to be Harvard University professors. Harvard staffers this week discovered that because of the higher cost of health insurance, they will now have a $250 deductible and $20 co-pays for office visits. That’s significantly more than they’ve been required to pay in the past.

Even so, “the Harvard health plan is still a much more generous plan than 99.9 percent of Americans have today,” said Joe Antos of the American Enterprise Institute. Professors can see any doctor they want, and many of the doctors they see were trained at Harvard Medical School.

Listen to Jim Henry’s report on Obamacare on The World and Everything in It: