The Obamacare Chronicles: Trader Joe’s to drop coverage for part-time employees

**Posted by Phineas

"Obamacare has arrived"
“Obamacare has arrived”

In my area of Los Angeles, the Trader Joe’s employees and clientele tend to be liberal and well-left of liberal. I wonder what they think of this news?

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 toΒ delay that ruleΒ for a year.

Trader Joe’s hasΒ won kudosΒ 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.

They have an interesting idea of “little if any net cost,” since the projected increase in insurance rates in California are 23% for a 27-year old, and 14% for a 40-year old.

But, don’t blame Trader Joe’s; they’re just doing what makes economic sense for the business, given the perverse incentives built into Obamacare. Β The real targets for anger should be the Democrats and their allies, who shoved this anti-constitutional monstrosity down an unwilling nation’s throat, and the people who voted for them.

Such as many, many of the part-time employees at my local TJ’s, who’ve just had a hard lesson in the old adage, “elections have consequences.”

via Bryan Preston

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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