WASHINGTON - Maine Sen. Susan Collins today reintroduced a bill that she says is aimed at fixing a flaw in the Affordable Care Act.
The so-called "Forty Hours is Full Time Act" would change the ACA's definition of a full-time employee, from 30 hours a week to 40 hours a week.
Collins first introduced the bill two years ago, along with Democratic Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, after hearing that some employers were cutting worker hours to avoid insurance mandates. But critics say changing the full time definition to 40 hours actually creates more problems for workers.
As CEO of Home Care for Maine, Molly Baldwin oversees hundreds of employees that provide home health care services in all of Maine's 16 counties. She says these workers deserve health insurance, but it's unaffordable - for both the company and the workers.
Home Care for Maine relies on MaineCare - the state's Medicaid program - to run its business. And Baldwin says reimbursement rates haven't changed for a decade.
"Now, these are people who are earning between $9.50 and $10.50 an hour. And that income fluctuates depending on the number of hours they work," she says. "There are no guaranteed hours."
Hours vary from week to week, depending on clients' needs. But with the Affordable Care Act's current provision that 30 hours is full time, plus an employer mandate that kicked in this month, Home Care for Maine had to offer health insurance to more than 100 of its home care workers. Baldwin says 30 took them up on it. And that's going to put the company $200,000 in the hole within six months.
"If we don't get some kind of relief, we will spend our reserves, and probably within two years we will close our doors," she says. "So our workers will be unemployed and our consumers will go unserved."
Sen. Susan Collins says her Forty Hours is Full Time Act would provide much needed relief for businesses like Baldwin's because it would raise the threshold for employers to provide insurance. And she says it would also protect part-time workers from having their hours - and their paychecks - cut in order to avoid existing thresholds.
"As one superintendent in Maine explained to me, she is already tracking the number of hours per week that substitute teachers can teach, keeping them to 29 hours a week," Collins says.
The bill has the support of the National Restaurant Association, as well as the Maine State Chamber of Commerce. The chamber's vice president of government relations, Peter Gore, says the 30-hour definition is a common source of concern for Maine businesses because it's not in line with standard practices in which other benefits kick in at 40 hours.
"It's administratively burdensome and it leads to errors," Gore says. "And that concerns small businesses."
But critics of Collins' bill - including President Obama - say changing the definition of full time to 40 hours could create more problems. Independent health policy consultant Mitchell Stein explains that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 7 percent of the workforce works from 30 to 34 hours a week. But more than 40 percent of the workforce works 40 hours a week.
"So those are the people who, if you change the definition, you could simply cut one hour from their current schedule to 39 hours to make them ineligible for benefits," Stein says. "And that's a much larger group of people who could potentially be impacted."
But Sen. Collins balks at the notion that employers who already provide health insurance to employees who work 40 hours a week will suddenly drop those benefits. "That is not going to change," she says. "That's going to attract and keep good workers, and that is simply not going to change."
President Obama has promised to veto the bill if it passes. Collins says she hopes he'll reconsider the bipartisan effort that she says helps workers.
