Fearing the potential financial impact of the Affordable Care Act, more business owners are getting around the mandate by cutting back their workers' hours in order to avoid having to supply their workers with employee benefits.
According to the Los Angeles Times, restaurant chains, movie theaters and retailers are increasingly dialing back the number of hours they're allotting to their employees in an effort to skirt the ACA's requirement that all employers provide health coverage to workers who labor a minimum of 30 hours per week, provided companies have at least 50 people on the payroll.
The paper reports that, based on data from researchers out of the University of California-Berkeley, an estimated 2.3 million workers nationwide could see their hours cut as a result of the mandate.
Though the ACA is scheduled to go into effect January 2014, lawmakers are skeptical that it will be ready to go by the deadline, despite Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying it will be. At a recent political party convention, legislators said that the ACA is too confusing, as business owners aren't aware of all they need to do to comply.
