This is Kelly. She’s a hard-working, independent college student. To pay for school, she works between 35 and 39 hours a week at her local grocery store.
But today’s been rough for Kelly. She has just been told that she’s now part of a new group of Americans: the “29ers”…
Starting in 2015, the Affordable Care Act requires many companies to offer health insurance to employees who work 30 hours or more a week. As you may have guessed, the grocery store Kelly works for is one of these companies.
The owners of her grocery store and companies like it would like to supply health insurance for all of their employees. Unfortunately, this isn’t an expense that many companies can afford and still stay in business without big price increases to consumers.
So now Kelly and hundreds of thousands of part-time employees’ hours are now capped at 29 hours per week, which means Kelly will have to find another part-time job to make up for the lost hours.
The law is flawed resulting in people having less money and still no health insurance. Sometimes government policies sound good, but have unintended consequences.