Obamacare Already Costing People Jobs

You already knew that some employers were either putting off hiring because of the increased cost of providing health care for their employees because of Obamacare, or shrinking back to less than 50 employees so that would not be subject to its mandates.  This article from the November 19, 2012 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that part-time employees of the Community College of Allegheny County are being cut back to less than 30 hours per week.  The reason is simple: employees who work 30 or more hours per week must be provided health insurance because of Obamacare -- and the college cannot afford to do this.  So it is cutting employee hours to a level where the college is not required to provide health insurance:

"It's kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don't have the money to pay for it," said Adam Davis, an adjunct professor who has taught biology at CCAC since 2005.

Yup.  Obamacare requires workers to buy health insurance if they are not otherwise covered -- and now the college has an incentive to cut their hours back even more.  I know that some of my fellow adjuncts are already uninsured because coverage for a family comes to about $1000 a month -- or considerably higher than what most have for house payments -- and of course teaching college pays very badly.  The article explains that adjuncts at the Community College of Allegheny County will be cut back from 12 semester hours to 10 semester hours to get below the 30 hours per week requirement. 

This alone is a joke; any adjunct who teaches 12 semester hours and only works 30 hours per week is either incredibly brilliant, not doing his job very well, or is otherwise pretty unusual.  To teach 12 semester hours means that you spend 12 hours per week in class, and quite typically 20 hours per week (on average) grading papers.

I do not want to sound mean, but there are consequences when you vote Obama, and those consequences are about to hit a lot of adjuncts there very hard.  I would be surprised if this does not happen at lots of colleges around the country.