Washington Monthly -Taking a cue from commercial establishments, one Pennsylvania community college, the Community College of Allegheny County, apparently plans to avoid providing Obamacare-required employee health insurance by cutting back professors’ hours. According to an article by Mary Niederberger of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Temporary part-time employees received an email notice ... on Tuesday informing them that the new health care act defines full-time employees as those working 30 hours or more per week. As a result, the college as of Dec. 31 will reduce temporary part-time employee hours to 25 per week. For adjuncts, the workload limit will be reduced from 12 to 10 credits per semester.The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) requires any company with more than 50 full-time employees to provide health insurance coverage to those employees. However, the law also defines “full-time” employees as those working more than 30 hours a week. That’s about 20 percent of the academic staff at CCAC. CCAC spokesman David Hoovler explained to Niederberger that while, “we certainly respect the contribution that these temporary employees make to this institution, this is just a step we have to take and we are confident we are well within the provisions of the act.” The move will save the community college about $6 million. In 2012 CCAC received $25.5 million from Allegheny County. County executives have proposed cutting that amount by more than $1 million.
Joel Chamberlain, Accountant - Many larger businesses are working now to find ways of reducing full-time staff to avoid the penalty. Some are also realizing that included in Obamacare is a new definition of full-time. The penalty for not offering affordable health insurance is $2,000 per employee. This amount increases to $3,000 for employees who receive tax credits to purchase health insurance from state healthcare exchanges. However, this tax is reserved for companies with 50 or more full-time or full-time equivalent employees. That means the difference between having 50 employees or 49 could be as much as $150,000 in taxes. In order to prevent employers from simply shaving an hour off of everyone’s work schedule, ACA has introduced two new definitions of “full-time”: For the purposes of this tax, full-time means anyone who works an average of 30 or more hours a week. Whereas in the past someone could work 39 hours and still be considered part-time, ACA changes this rule when determining who is a large employer. Full-time equivalent, or FTE employees represent a composite of multiple part time employees whose hours add up to more than 30. In other words, if you have 50 people all working 40 hours and you replace one of those workers with two people working 19 hours each, the result you still have 50 full-time or full-time equivalent employees. The two part-timers have total average hours in excess of 30, making them effectively one full-time equivalent employee. Please continue reading at:
