A billboard on West 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues advertising the defunding of "Obamacare" the Affordable Care Act (ACA), paid for by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is pictured in New York September 12, 2013. Mike Segar | Reuters

Obamacare is killing jobs in and around the Big Apple, executives say. About 20 percent of companies in the New York region say they are cutting their workforce in response to the Affordable Care Act, according to a new Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey. And most companies said they will be paying more in insurance premiums, and requiring their workers to pay a bigger share of those premiums, as a result of Obamacare.

The survey results come two days after the large health insurer Aetna joined rivals UnitedHealth Group and Humana in announcing it would significantly cut back the number of geographic areas where it sells Obamacare plans next year due to steep losses on those plans. The New York Fed survey found that, "roughly 17 percent of service sector firms and 21 percent of manufacturers said they were reducing the number of workers in response to the ACA." "The vast majority of respondents in both surveys [of manufacturing and service company executives] said they were not changing the proportion of part-time workers or the amount of work outsourced to other firms," said the report, which questioned about 250 executives in New York state, northern New Jersey and Fairfield County, Connecticut. That point is noteworthy because there had been speculation that companies would cut the number of employees who work 30 or more hours per week to avoid having to offer them health insurance, as Obamacare now requires for firms with 50 or more such workers.