With Full Employment Business could not simply opt-out of Obamacare
The ACA cannot work properly without something approaching full employment. (Full employment is less than 100% employment. It's a technical level equal to somewhere between 3%-5% unemployment, dependent on some other economic factors.)
A cut in hours is a cut in pay. A cut in benefits is a cut in pay.
The only reason anyone can hand out de facto pay-cuts is that we have millions of unemployed and even more millions of under-employed people depressing wages... and hours and benefits.
In a proper labor market businesses could not summarily cut their full-time workers to 27 hours per week, as many have. The workers would leave, to take other jobs providing 40 hour weeks. If there were such other jobs to be taken.
With a weak employment market businesses can effectively opt out of Obamacare.
With a strong employment market they cannot.
This unemployment bomb was always implicit in an employer's-choice system but I guess people thought the economy was going to magically fix itself.
I support ACA versus not ACA. This post is not anti-ACA. It is anti-unemployment.
The Republicans are very, very stupid about economics. I am sure they have depressed the economy just for the sake of depressing the economy and most didn't realize that they were also empowering businesses the tools to wage war on Obamacare. But they were.
(And by playing the dumb-ass deficit-concern pantomime game, so were the Democrats. We could not have fixed things unilatterally after 2010, but there was no reason to make things even worse.)
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