ACA Strikes Again: Trading-it-in at Trader Joe’s

“After extending health care coverage to many of its part-time employees for years, Trader Joe's has told workers who log fewer than 30 hours a week that they will need to find insurance on the Obamacare exchanges next year, according to a confidential memo from the grocer's chief executive.

In the memo to staff dated Aug. 30, Trader Joe's CEO Dan Bane said the company will cut part-timers a check for $500 in January and help guide them toward finding a new plan under the Affordable Care Act. The company will continue to offer health coverage to workers who carry 30 hours or more on average.
 
The law mandates that companies with 50 employees or more offer coverage to such full-time employees, though the Obama administration has chosen to delay that rule for a year.

Trader Joe's has won kudos for offering its health care, dental and vision plans to part-time workers at a reasonable price -- a rarity in an industry known for low pay and scant benefits. But with low-wage workers eligible for tax subsidies to buy health insurance next year, the company has apparently calculated that offering medical coverage to part-timers who work 18 hours or more is no longer worth the cost.

"Depending on income you may earn outside of Trader Joe's" -- i.e., another job -- "we believe that with the $500 from Trader Joe's and the tax credits available under the ACA, many of you should be able to obtain health care coverage at very little if any net cost to you," Bane wrote in the memo.” - Trader Joe's To Drop Health Coverage For Part-Time Workers Under Obamacare: Memo, Huffington Post, 09/12/2013

Observation: For several years and most notably in the last several months the Obama Administration has assured time and again that ACA will not cause employers to dump their health plans and direct their employees to the health insurance exchanges. Possibly the Obama Administration should take some advice from Winston Churchill: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”.

The results are that employers through a variety of methods are in fact dumping health insurance coverage or limiting any expansion of health insurance coverage. Methods such as wholesale dumping of health plans, to limiting current and future hires to twenty nine hours and hence part-time status and exempt from ACA rules, a combination of both or more limited action of excluding spouses where the spouse is employed and qualifies through his/her own employer, among other stratagem.  

Moreover, the employer that rationally deploys methods to deflect massive price increases associated with providing ACA central planner designed health insurance plans, directs employees to the health insurance exchanges where the exchange in effect uses other people’s money to subsidize coverage price as well as deductibles and co-insurance e.g. “we believe that with the $500 from Trader Joe's and the tax credits available under the ACA, many of you should be able to obtain health care coverage at very little if any net cost to you," Bane wrote in the memo.” There are no tax credits, there are merely taxpayer subsidies. Who pays? You pay.

We end with focused benefit and diffused costs [price]. That is, certain individuals pay little or nothing for health insurance while the many pay the price. Hence the moral melodrama of the politico i.e. millions without health insurance, is solved by the immoral act of coercively taking of others resources.

Link to the entire Huffington Post article appears below:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/11/trader-joes-obamacare_n_3902341.html



Update 09/15/2013: ObamaCare Employer Mandate: A List Of Cuts To Work Hours, Jobs, IBD 09/06/2013.

http://news.investors.com/politics-obamacare/090613-669013-obamacare-employer-mandate-a-list-of-cuts-to-work-hours-jobs.htm?fromcampaign=1