Two months ago, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner suddenly started talking about "restoring the 40 hour workweek," which they said the Affordable Care Act had destroyed. It was about as misleading an argument as you'd imagine; what it has to do with is the fact that the ACA defines "full-time" work as 30 hours or above for the purpose of the employer mandate, which affects only companies with 50 or more employees (96 percent of which already offer health insurance to their employees). The reason 30 hours was chosen as the line was that if you pegged "full-time" as only 40 hours and above, an employer could reduce an hourly employee's hours down to 39 hours and say, "You're now a part-time employee, so we don't have to offer you health coverage."
But that is exactly what Republicans want. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they really don't care whether that happens to workers or not, but if changing the full-time line from 30 to 40 hours will undermine the ACA, they're all for it. So yesterday, in one of their first acts of the new Congress, the House passed a bill to make this change. How many Republicans voted against it? Zero.
But let's give credit where it's due. Here's an editorial in the National Review on the topic:
Republican leadership has an odd idea for one of its first big policy pushes of this Congress: a change to Obamacare that threatens to make the law worse.
The idea, expected to come to a vote in the House on Thursday, is to change Obamacare's requirement that most employers provide full-time workers with generous health insurance, a rule known as the "employer mandate." (Or the "employer shared responsibility provisions," if you prefer Gruber-speak). It sets the definition of full-time work at 30 hours a week.
Republicans have been making the case for some time-and no small number of Democrats and liberals are sympathetic-that employers will reduce workers' hours to avoid paying the substantial penalty or providing costly insurance, and that this outweighs the benefits of some workers' getting insurance thanks to the rule.
The current GOP plan, in the main, is to raise the threshold for full-time work to 40 hours. That may be a more reasonable definition, but there are more Americans who work 40 hours a week or a bit more than there are who work just over 30 hours. The proposal risks, theoretically, cuts to the working hours of many more workers.
Obviously, I feel warmly toward this editorial because I happen to agree with its position. But it also isn't easy for a conservative publication to come out and say the entire Republican party is wrong. The National Review is taking what, for conservatives, is a radical position: that even if you want to repeal the entire ACA, it's possible for repealing one small part of it to be a bad idea.
If that notion starts to take hold, you might find Republicans actually considering working to improve the law, as opposed to just thinking up ways to throw sand in its gears even if they harm millions of people in the process.
OK, so maybe that's going a bit too far.