ACA is such a hot-button issue now that whenever employers or health-care providers (or anyone else) makes an unpopular change, naysayers are quick to jump on it and say "See I told you so -- Obamacare is bad! What do you have to say about that?" Often, these incidents are distorted or not even true (or there is a huge stretch of logic to tie it to ACA) -- but sometimes it seems there are negative consequences. I will share two such and invite readers to tell me how they would respond to these situations.
#1 -- Employer screws employees because of ACA. I teach at a large public university in a red state -- a state that is fighting against implementing ACA. Earlier this year a memo went out from HR instructing all managers that hourly employees could not work more than 29 hours per week. Since most of our hourly employees worked 40 hours per week, this was a real dent in their income. The rationalizing logic behind this was mind boggling. It wasn't that the university wanted to avoid insuring these people because of the cost. Rather, hourly employees are at-will employees. If they were insured, they would no longer be at-will and the university needed the flexibility to be able to fire these people at will. And, of course, wing nuts blame the ACA for forcing the university administration to make the policies they did (even if it was cost).
#2 -- Health care provider makes changes because of ACA. Our youngest child has some special needs requiring specialized health care from an interdisciplinary team. The children's hospital where she has been receiving her care for the last 16 years recently decided to shut down that team -- and we and 800 other families have had to scramble to find alternatives. And, of course, wing nuts of our acquaintance are quick to blame ACA for what happened. One acquaintance last night went so far as to exclaim "They said there wouldn't be death panels -- well guess what, there are death panels!" I have no idea what the actual chain of events was that led to the closing of this particular specialized team -- I do expect dollars were involved and provisions of ACA may have been an impetus.
In both of these situations the ACA was (or was suspected to be) at the root of some decisions that had negative consequences for various innocent bystanders. But how does one even begin to have a discussion (or should one have a discussion) with the wing nuts who see the ACA to blame for everything that goes wrong, regardless of the actual cause (or chain of causes)? And, to be fair, what if it is actually the case that ACA has negative consequences in some cases?