Griffin: Obamacare Hurts the Most Vulnerable Workers

Press Release

At today's Ways and Means Committee hearing on Obamacare's "30-hour rule," Congressman Tim Griffin (AR-02) questioned Lanhee Chen, Ph.D., about Obamacare's arbitrary definition of a full-time employee.

The employer mandate in President Obama's health care law defines full-time employment as 30 hours per week, which has caused many employers to reduce workers' hours to less than 30 per week, impacting their health insurance status and their wages.

Rep. Griffin listed specific examples of Arkansans harmed by Obamacare in this way, including at Arkansas State University, the Area Agency on Aging and Pulaski Technical College.

According to a Hoover Institution study, 2.6 million Americans making under $30,000 are at risk of having their hours and wages cut as a result of ObamaCare's 30-hour rule. Of that:

60 percent are between the ages of 19 and 34 -- making the 30-hour rule particularly damaging for younger American workers.
90 percent do not have a college degree.
63 percent are women.
Over 600,000 workers in the retail trade, 225,000 workers in the education industry, and 589,000 workers in restaurants, are at risk of having their hours and wages cut.
Rep. Griffin is a cosponsor of Rep. Todd Young's (IN-09) Save American Workers Act (H.R. 2575), which would repeal Obamacare's 30-hour definition of "full-time employment" and restore the traditional 40-hour definition.

HEARING TRANSCRIPT EXCERPTS:

GRIFFIN: Where did the 30-hour number come from?

CHEN: There are different explanations. Some are that it was a product of legislative compromise. Some might say it was pulled out of a hat. But it certainly doesn't make sense to me from where I'm sitting here.

GRIFFIN: Well in Arkansas we try to apply a little common sense. I don't know anywhere where 30 hours is full time. If you just want to have some kind of a requirement that's one thing, but to call 30 hours is full time--in France it's not even full time. In France it's 35 hours and its moving toward a 40. So that's on its face laughable.

When I look at the folks who have been impacted--let me tell you the sad part. And this often happens here. Good intentions by people on both sides of the aisle make their way into legislation which fails. Let me give you an example.

At Arkansas State University--the alma mater of our Democratic Governor--they had to cut folks back to a maximum of 28 hours per week. Now I assume that those are people that the people who wrote this law wanted to make sure had insurance. They wanted to give them insurance. That's the goal. What did they get? No insurance and less play! Genius! That's a genius federal program right there.

Let me read you another one. Area Agency on Aging of Western Arkansas. They did the same thing, went down to 28 hours a week. These people already had insurance because prior to the passage of Obamacare they had been taking part in a program offered with the state of Arkansas called Arkansas Health Networks. So these people now lose their health insurance and get paid less. Just a great deal for them, right?

Asian American hotel owners and operators have complained to me about this. Numerous stories from back home--Pulaski Technical College and the list goes on and on and on.

I don't doubt the well-intentioned actions of a lot of people, but Washington often gets it wrong.

When I look at who [Obamacare] hurts, they're the people that folks up here in Washington talk about wanting to help. The vulnerable….Lower income folks, vulnerable folks, seniors, it hurts jobs, school districts, colleges, small businesses. If I were to adopt the Democrat language, I would probably say that the 30-hour rule is a weapon in the war on women, the war on lower income folks, the war on the vulnerable, the war on seniors, the war on job creation, the war on school districts, the war on colleges and small businesses--sounds ludicrous doesn't it? Well that's the type of language that's used here. And let me tell you, the people that say they want to help those folks, they are hurting them. I have pages and pages and pages of letters [from] people talking about the impact of this [Obamacare]….I hear so many voices from back home and it's no consolation to them that the jobs that they're losing in the private sector are being replaced by the county whatever expanding government jobs which aren't sustainable and are with borrowed money anyway. I mean, this is ridiculous."

The President has basically recognized a lot of these problems. The number one person in terms of repealing Obamacare has been President Obama. He does it unilaterally all the time. He doesn't like it when we do it; maybe we can convince him to take a look at this [H.R. 2575, the Save American Workers Act].

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