2575) is a bill that would change how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act defines full-time worker, by raising the threshold for offering employer-provided insurance from a minimum of 30 to 40 work hours a week.
[5] Proponents of the reform law wanted to address the parts of the healthcare system they believed to not be working well, while causing minimal disruption to those happy with the coverage they have.
[6] The intent of the employer mandate (along with a grandfather clause in the ACA) is to help ensure that existing employer-sponsored insurance plans that people like will stay in place.
[9][10] Several businesses and the State of Virginia have clarified the contracts of their part-time employees by adding a 29-hour-a-week cap,[11][12] to reflect the 30-hour threshold for full-time hours, as defined by the law.
[14][15] The impact of this provision on employers' decision-making is partially offset by other factors: offering healthcare helps attract and retain employees, while increasing productivity and reducing absenteeism; and to trade a smaller full-time workforce for a larger part-time work force carries costs of training and administration for a business.
[9][17] They argue that the perverse incentives regarding part-time hours, even if they do not change many existing insurance plans, are real and harmful;[19][20] that the raised marginal cost of the 50th worker for businesses could limit companies' growth;[21] that the costs of reporting and administration—the paperwork for businesses and the state enforcement—are not worth the trade-off of incentivizing the maintenance of current employer plans;[19][20] and note that the employer mandate, unlike the individual mandate, is a non-essential part of the law.
[22][23] Some analysts have suggested that an alternate 'pay or play' version of the employer mandate would partially avoid these problems, by instead taxing business that do not offer insurance by a percentage of their payroll rather than using the 50-employee and 30-hour cut-offs.
2575 would alter the calculation of the number of full-time equivalent employees for the purposes of determining which employers are subject to penalties under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for not offering health insurance for their employees or for offering insurance that does not meet certain criteria specified in the law.
[26] The Save American Workers Act of 2013 was introduced into the United States House of Representatives on June 28, 2013 by Rep. Todd C. Young (R, IN-9).
[2] Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R-TX) said that the ACA "fundamentally changed the labor law in this country, creating a new standard called the 30-hour workweek.