Restaurant Owners Head To Washington To Plead For Obamacare Sanity
They can ask, but they won’t get it
(The Hill) Franchise restaurant owners have come to Washington seeking a change to ObamaCare that they say could prevent them from having to cut their employees’ hours.
The healthcare law requires large employers to provide insurance to employees who work at least 30 hours per week.
Franchise owners say the employer mandate threatens to erase their narrow profit margins and are telling lawmakers they need to overhaul the law before it’s too late.
“Employees won’t have the hours they need, and they won’t get employer-sponsored healthcare, either,” said Steve Caldeira, president and CEO of the International Franchise Association (IFA).
“[Franchisees] are dealing with high commodity costs, high energy prices, higher taxes from the ‘fiscal-cliff’ deal, and now they are trying to work through ObamaCare,” he said.
What they’re asking for is that the regulations be changed so that only people who work 40 hours or more be considered full time employees. The even have a website, 40hoursisfulltime.com, to push for the changes. Of course, it was the Department of Health and Human Services that deemed 30 hours to be full time amongst their 20,000+ pages of regulations. And pro-Obamacare lawmakers will not vote to increase the full-time hours, because they want people dumped from their company insurance plans and moved to government backed plans.
Nor do Obamacare backers care that workers hours are being cut, which means their earnings are lower: it’s all about putting the government in charge of as many people’s healthcare as possible and moving towards a single payer system.
Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.