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The only surprise here is the source. The details are all too familiar - Townhall
Employers around the country, from fast-food franchises to colleges, have told NBC News that they will be cutting workers’ hours below 30 a week because they can’t afford to offer the health insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. “To tell somebody that you’ve got to decrease their hours because of a law passed in Washington is very frustrating to me,” said Loren Goodridge, who owns 21 Subway franchises, including a restaurant in Kennebunk. “I know the impact I’m having on some of my employees.” Goodridge said he’s cutting the hours of 50 workers to no more than 29 a week so he won’t trigger the provision in the new health care law that requires employers to offer coverage to employees who work 30 hours or more per week...The White House dismisses such examples as "anecdotal." Jason Furman, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, said, “We are seeing no systematic evidence that the Affordable Care Act is having an adverse impact on job growth or the number of hours employees are working. … [S]ince the ACA became law, nearly 90 percent of the gain in employment has been in full-time positions.”
Among the people who could be hit by future hour cuts are public school teachers and other workers. Many small businesses are being forced to make major, costly decisions about employees' coverage without all the facts, leading to widespread uncertainty. It's no wonder that 41 percent of small business owners told Gallup that they've instituted a hiring freeze? Another 19 percent have actually shed jobs "as a specific result of the Affordable Care Act." Will the White House sneer at this data as "anecdotal," too? Of course federal workers want no part of this law. I'll leave you with two Obamacare-related items: (1) Fox News' Chris Stirewalt dredges up this classic quote from the president, from when he was pushing the law back in 2010:
“We can't have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people…. And they will keep on doing this for as long as they can get away with it.”
Stirewalt argues -- as I did yesterday -- that the administration's new cost-cap delay "works better for insurance companies than it does for the American people."
