Much has been made of the burdens of the Affordable Care Act on healthy young men, but young women are the ones most likely to see the law push them out of full-time work.
A “29er” refers to someone working 29 hours per week, the maximum that an hourly employee can work and still be considered part time by the federal government, as defined under the Affordable Care Act.
Before 2014, when the new federal definition took effect, Census Bureau data suggest that hardly anyone worked exactly 29 hours a week: about one in 1,000. Only six in 1,000 worked 26 to 29 hours a week.
The Affordable Care Act requires that, beginning next January, large employers provide health insurance for their full-time employees (by the federal definition) or pay a penalty per full-time employee on the payroll. The annual penalty is $2,000 and, unlike employee salaries and benefits, is not deductible from business taxes. Small employers do not owe a penalty, unless they cross the 50-employee threshold, in which case the annual penalty is $40,000 for having that 50th employee. Subsequent hires would each carry a $2,000 annual penalty.
Part-time employees do not create a health-insurance requirement or a penalty for their employer, which gives large and small employers an incentive to reduce at least some employees’ hours to 29 hours. A number of employers plan to do exactly this.
But the incentives are not limited to penalty avoidance by employers, and began this month. Employees in families with income of less than 400 percent of the poverty line will lose access to generous federal subsidies if they make themselves eligible for employer health coverage by working full time at an employer that offers coverage to such employees.
In other words, employees may have something to gain, or less to lose than they did before this year, by limiting themselves to a 29-hour work schedule. For full-time salaried workers (as opposed to hourly workers) the federal definition is those who work more than three days a week. (For the purposes of discussion, I will refer to the three-day limit as “29 hours,” although in practice it may be, say, a 26-hour schedule).
As the new law goes into full effect the next couple of years, I expect that more than 2 percent of workers will be 29ers, an increase by more than a factor of 10. Moreover, as the labor market adjusts to avoid penalties and enhance subsidies, the adjustments will tend to be those that are least costly.
One of the least costly ways to move full-time workers to the 29er group would be to focus on those who already work slightly more than 29 hours. It is usually less costly for a 35-hour-per-week worker to cut hours to 29 than for a 55-hour-per-week worker to do so.
I used the Census Bureau’s data to put together a sample of people likely to be 29ers over the next couple of years, based on working 30 to 37 hours per week before this year and not having health insurance available through a spouse (if married). Women outnumber men more than 2 to 1 among likely 29ers. The 29ers are also likely to be less than 30 years old.
Naturally, working fewer hours means less pay. By disproportionately reducing women’s work hours, health reform may have the unintended consequence of increasing the gap between men’s and women’s wages and salaries.
[Note: this does not mean that women are "hurt" by the ACA ... it just means that (on average) they experience the ACA's costs differently than men will]
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