The Damage Has Been Done: PPACA Has Resulted in Caps on Worker Hours Despite Employer Mandate Suspension

This is from Sandhya Somashekhar at the Washington Post (link): 

For Kevin Pace, the president’s health-care law could have meant better health insurance. Instead, it produced a pay cut.

Like many of his colleagues, the adjunct music professor at Northern Virginia Community College had managed to assemble a hefty course load despite his official status as a part-time employee. But his employer, the state, slashed his hours this spring to avoid a Jan. 1 requirement that all full-time workers for large employers be offered health insurance. The law defines “full time” as 30 hours a week or more....

This month, the Obama administration delayed the employer insurance requirement until January 2015. But Virginia, like some other employers around the country that capped part-timers’ hours in anticipation of the initial deadline, has no plans to abandon its new 29-hour-a-week limit.

The impact on Pace and thousands of other workers in Virginia is an unintended consequence of the health law, which, as the most sweeping new social program in decades, is beginning to reshape aspects of American life.

Under the law, companies with 50 or more workers will be required to provide health insurance to all their full-time employees or face significant fines.

The decision to delay that requirement was welcomed by business groups, which said companies needed more time to adapt to the law. But the delay has emboldened the law’s critics, who say it is evidence that the statute is ill-conceived and should be repealed....

When the law was written, advocates hoped the employer requirement would help reduce the ranks of the uninsured. Some employers have said they would offer insurance to additional workers, but others have gone in the opposite direction.

Virginia’s situation provides a good lens on why. The state has more than 37,000 part-time, hourly wage employees, with as many as 10,000 working more than 30 hours a week. Offering coverage to those workers, who include nurses, park rangers and adjunct professors, would have been prohibitively expensive, state officials said, costing as much as $110 million annually.

[A recent study] found that 12 percent of employers in a survey last year planned to cut staff hours to avoid a jump in costs under the new rules....