House Republicans plan to vote Thursday on their first big Obamacare bill of the year, which would change the law’s work-week standards and allow more employers to avoid its employer mandate. But the bill is getting some serious pushback from an unlikely source: the conservative National Review Online.
The bill would repeal the law’s 30-hour work week definition and raise it to 40 hours. That is the standard that determines employers’ responsibilities to cover their employees under Obamacare’s employer mandate.
In an editorial with the subhed, “Don’t raise the cutoff to 40 hours,” the magazine’s editors criticized the new Congress’s proposal, which the White House has already threatened to veto.
“Republican leadership has an odd idea for one of its first big policy pushes of this Congress: a change to Obamacare that threatens to make the law worse,” they wrote.
They noted that it risks cutting hours for many more workers than the law’s current 30-hour definition and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated it would raise the deficit by more than $50 billion — and House Republicans “are not planning to pay for it.” CBO also estimated up to 1 million people would lose their current health coverage under the proposal.
It isn’t that NRO, which recently brought on executive editor Reiham Salam, suddenly supports Obamacare. Indeed, they reiterate that the law should still be dismantled. Rather, its editors argue that Republicans should be aiming higher and instead propose repealing the law’s employer mandate entirely, which some believe that the White House might actually agree to.
“Repealing the employer mandate just stands a much better chance of becoming law during President Obama’s final two years in office,” they wrote. “It is one of the relatively few steps toward repealing Obamacare of which that can be said.”
“Republicans won the 2014 elections handily on the grounds that they would seize such opportunities, not waste them.”
