Workweek bill is first GOP Senate test on Obamacare

The House will vote again on Thursday to lengthen Obamacare’s full-time workweek definition to 40 hours, but the Senate has work to do before it can hope to get its first anti-Obamacare bill to the president’s desk.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said making the switch from 30 to 40 hours is at the top of the GOP’s Obamacare priorities, along with repealing a tax on the medical-device industry. But an immediate slam dunk could prove elusive.


Lobbyists backing the workweek bill said they haven’t yet lined up the 60 votes — including at least six Democrats, who would have to cross party lines despite the renewed White House veto threat — needed to bring the measure to the Senate floor.

They think they can do that but not before the end of this month — at the earliest. And after a lot of scrambling.

The bill is the first test case for how the new Republican majority will go after the Affordable Care Act. The intensity of the lobbying is a reminder of the gap between the Republican “repeal and replace” aspirations and the challenge of rolling back a nearly 5-year-old law that’s now covering millions of Americans.

“We’re not there yet,” said Christine Pollack, vice president of government affairs at the Retail Industry Leaders Association. “It’s going to take grass-roots efforts and traditional shoe-leather lobbying to actually bring that vote to the Senate floor.”

The workweek bill affects how many people are covered by the employer mandate, which went into effect Jan. 1 for businesses with 100 or more workers. They have to offer insurance to 70 percent of their full-time workforce this year, or pay penalties. Full time, for this purpose, is 30 hours.

Critics of the 30-hour rule say it will force employers to slash workers’ hours to escape the penalties. But many Democrats and even some prominent conservative policy experts say the change will do more harm than good. Some would rather get rid of the employer mandate altogether rather than tinker with it.

Millions more people work a traditional 40-hour workweek than the 30-hour range, so putting the cutoff at 40 may give employers an incentive to game the hours of a much larger group of workers.

CATO Institute scholar Michael Cannon wrote Wednesday that the bill might lighten Obamacare’s business burden but drive up government spending by making more people eligible for the health law’s subsidies. “How is that a policy victory?” he writes, adding that it was also wrongheaded strategy.

The House passed the same measure last year with some Democratic support, but it never got a vote in the Senate. The White House threatened to veto it then, and press secretary Josh Earnest repeated that on Tuesday.

“This proposed change would actually do a lot of harm, not just to the Affordable Care Act but to a substantial number of workers across the country,” he said.

Industry groups who back the 40-hour definition had concerns that some Republicans would continue to insist on a repeal-or-bust approach to Obamacare — especially Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). But Cruz said this week he would “absolutely” support the measure even though it’s less than a full-scale repeal.

“I support repealing every single word of Obamacare,” Cruz said Tuesday. “That being said, I have long been on the record saying that we should, one after the other, repeal the most onerous aspects of Obamacare.”

Lee’s office did not respond to a question about his position on the bill, which is expected to easily pass the House on Thursday.

The lobbyists pushing the change, including the National Retail Federation and the National Federation of Independent Business, remain confident that they can get the 60 votes in the Senate, in time.

Angelo Amador, senior vice president of labor and workforce for the National Restaurant Association, said the group counted up to 58 votes for the measure before the holiday, and he expects more Democrats to join. Of the “repeal or nothing” Republicans, he said, “I think eventually they will come around. ”

Matt Haller, senior vice president at the International Franchise Association, echoed that sentiment.

“We feel confident that at the end of the day we’re going to be able to put up the votes needed to move this to this president’s desk,” he said.

Lobbyists said that moderate Democratic senators who have been open to making changes to the health law are among those who could tip the scales, including Mark Warner (Va.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Michael Bennet (Colo.), Bob Casey (Pa.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) and Jon Tester (Mont.), as well as independent Angus King of Maine.

But it remains to be seen which, if any, of them might cross over. Heitkamp did not seem convinced as of Tuesday. The Affordable Care Act is made of interwoven provisions that can’t simply be cut one by one without a broader package of changes, she said. “I think [it] would be wrong to take little snippets,” she said.

The bill is getting a new push in the Senate now. Co-sponsors Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana held a press conference Wednesday morning to highlight their “Forty Hours is Fulltime Act.” Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia supports it as well. If those two Democrats plus all 54 Republican senators vote for the measure, they need four more Democrats, although the veto hammer looms even then.

“My hope is that the president will reconsider his veto threat and take a look at this bill, which is bipartisan, which does not undermine the essential structure of the law that he promoted, and that can be a sign that he is willing to work with members on both sides of the aisle to remedy what is a very serious flaw that is going to hurt our workers,” Collins said.

The Senate HELP Committee may take up the bill as soon as later this month, two sources said. HELP ranking Democrat Patty Murray (Wash.) pledged to fight the change.

“It’s deeply disappointing that as one of their first priorities, Republicans are putting forward a proposal that would not only hurt workers by denying them the health care coverage they depend on, but would actually encourage companies to cut many workers’ hours across the country,” Murray said in an emailed statement Tuesday.

The mandate is being phased in and will eventually require employers with 50 or more workers to offer affordable health coverage to nearly all of their employees who work more than 30 hours a week.

Because most large employers already offer coverage, the requirement primarily hits the unskilled, low-wage service industry, including restaurants, hotels and retail chains, where employees’ hours can vary week to week and often only full-time managers receive benefits.

While there have been anecdotal reports of employers cutting hours, as the economy improves, many businesses have instead expanded the number of people they cover. There are no signs of a broad shift to more part-time workers.

The independent Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday that the House’s bill would add $53.2 billion to the deficit from 2015 to 2025. That’s because fewer businesses would pay fines and because some of the employees who would have been covered at work will instead get subsidies to buy plans on the Obamacare exchanges.

The CBO estimated that about 1 million people would lose their work-based coverage, a fact that Democrats intend to highlight.

“I’m open to working with anyone on common-sense changes that would expand access to health care for families — but unfortunately this bill would do the exact opposite,” Murray said.