Some school basketball teams may lose out on practice time because of Obamacare.
Schools throughout much of Indiana are cutting the hours of coaches, teachers aides, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and other support staff in an attempt to avoid having to offer them health insurance under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports.
Under the law, also known as Obamacare, employers with more than 50 workers will be required to provide coverage for all official full-time employees. Some employers plan to try and skirt the law by pushing full-time employees into part-time work.
“We cannot go out and raise the price of our product to assist us covering this,” Les Huddle, superintendent of the Lafayette School Corporation, told the Courier-Journal.
Huddle’s district reduced the hours of about 600 employees to avoid the choice of covering them under Obamacare or paying a fine. As he notes, publicly-funded institutions face different constraints than the businesses that drew criticism for threatening to cut workers’ hours in order to cover the cost of Obamacare.
Cash-strapped local governments have laid off public sector workers in the wake of the economic downturn. Some public colleges and universities have also cut adjunct professors hours to limit costs in an environment of budget constraints. And Long Beach, Calif. officials said last month that they would be cutting some of the hours of the city’s part-time workers to avoid covering them under the health law.
Still, the new law likely won’t hurt most workers. Nearly 90 percent of employers said they don’t plan to shift full-time workers to part-time status as a result of Obamacare, a March survey from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve found.
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