Richard Trumka
The Affordable Care Act
needs to be strengthened, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has said several times now. At last week's
Christian Science Monitor roundtable, for instance:
“We have been working with the administration to find solutions to the inadvertent holes in the act,” Trumka said. “We are working to try solve problems, just like they tried to solve problems with employers, with large business and small business groups.” [...]
Unions are also worried that the law allows employers to not provide healthcare coverage to workers who work less than 30 hours per week. Trumka said companies could cut down on their employees’ work schedules to avoid providing health benefits.
“So that’s something that needs to be addressed. Is that an issue? Yeah, that’s an issue,” Trumka said.
So what's the Republican Party's take on this?
RT @RNCResearch: VIDEO: AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka: ObamaCare is Causing Businesses To Cut Employee Hours
http://t.co/...
— @Reince
If you follow the link in that official Republican tweet, you'll find a video in which Trumka says basically the same thing he said at the
Christian Science Monitor event: It's a problem that businesses are not prevented from cutting their workers' hours to avoid having to provide health coverage. Specifically, Trumka told Al Jazeera, "what's happening is, you have employers that the law says if your employees work 30 hours or more a week you've got to give them health care. So they're restructuring their workforce to give workers 29 and a half hours per week so they don't have to provide them health care." This is by now a well-established phenomenon among low-wage employers. Because they're low-wage employers. And it's been a longtime practice of some employers that already offer benefits to full-time workers. The only way Obamacare is "causing" this is by confronting employers who would never provide health care and, in most cases, were never real big on full-time work with the prospect of having to provide health care.
Republicans would like the take-away to be that Obamacare is somehow causing businesses such distress that they have no other choice but to cut worker hours. What Trumka is saying is entirely different, though. He's saying that one of the ways the law needs to be strengthened is to prevent bosses from doing this. By the exact same logic, if Trumka had come out for single-payer health care, @RNCResearch could have claimed that he was opposed to Obamacare.