The Law of Unintended Consequences IV

I'm going to continue discussing Obamacare.  It is such a MessAPolitico on so many different levels, in so many different ways, I could write about it forever.  Let's think about the affect of the rule requiring employees that work 30+ hours per week to be provided with health insurance.

My father-in-law is retired and in his 70's.  He receives Medicare and has a Medicare Supplement policy that gives him excellent coverage for him and his wife.  He is healthy.  Since he never earned a huge salary in his working career, they never saved a lot for retirement.  He retired at age 65, but has continued to work at several part time jobs.  I think he likes to stay busy, and they really need the extra income to maintain their comfortable life style.  He has routinely worked 40 hours/week in his current "part time" job.

Along comes Obamacare.  Now his employer must offer him health insurance or pay a big tax.  So, can you guess what the employer did?  That's right; his hours have been cut back to under 30/week.  Now the family income has gone down by about 25%.  He still must pay the cost of his Medicare supplement policy.  None of his expenses - groceries, gasoline, clothing, dining out, electricity, water - have gone down 25%.  Since the earnings have gone down, they do pay less in taxes, unless he goes through the hassle of finding another part time job to fill in the lost income.  The government doesn't collect the tax penalty and they collect less from this particular household.  Who exactly is this good for?

Let's say you own one or more fast food franchises.  These restaurants typically employ a lot of high school and college kids.  The kids generally are covered by their parents' health insurance plan.  What does Obamacare do for these fast food workers?  Well, they all get cut back to less than 30 hours/week.  The college kids don't earn as much money to pay for that expensive college education.  That puts the family finances in a strain or the kids end up with a big loan to pay back after graduation.  It isn't unusual for a new college graduate to have $20,000 in debt at graduation, and to add insult to injury, there's a decent chance they won't be able to even find a job in their field of study.  It's like having a big new car loan to pay off, but you don't have the new car.  My life, and in fact, my entire family's lives would have been much different had I started in the hole when I graduated from college.

The Obama administration and the liberals in congress, look at all of this as a plus.  If they have two people employed 20 hours/week instead of one employed 40 hours/week, the unemployment numbers improve.  We definitely have the unintended consequence of under-employment, i.e. reduced household income.  Just another facet of the massive MessAPolitico that is Obamacare.  Thanks socialist democrats.