Rejecting Proposal

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Obama would reject the new effort to change the law.

“The proposal they offered before, it kicked a lot of people off of health care and cost a lot of money,” Pfeiffer told Bloomberg reporters and editors today in an interview. “It was bad policy and bad for the American people.”

Obama is “not going to accept anything that undermines the core elements of the health-care act, that takes health care away from 10 million people who have it,” he said.

The Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate requires companies with at least 100 employees to offer affordable insurance coverage next year to at least 70 percent of those who work 30 or more hours per week.

While raising that threshold “wouldn’t have a meaningful effect on the number of people who have insurance,” it would “essentially wipe out” the employer mandate, said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-policy research group.

Cutting full-time employees to fewer than 30 hours a week to skirt the current law’s mandate would be disruptive to business operations, but it might be easier for a company to reduce hours to just below 40, Levitt said.

Foreseeing Move

The Congressional Budget Office foresaw just that kind of rejiggering of work hours when it prepared cost estimates on the House legislation earlier this year.

“Without changing the total number of hours worked by its employees, an employer might reassign hours worked so that there are more employees just below the 40-hour threshold than there would otherwise be,” according to the CBO report in February.

As a result, CBO estimated, between 500,000 and 1 million people would be moved into Medicaid or onto health exchanges, and half a million would wind up without insurance.

Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation estimated a 40-hour- per week threshold would increase the federal budget deficit by $73.7 billion over 10 years.

“There is a substantial cost associated with this change,” said Nancy-Ann DeParle, a former White House adviser who worked on the law. “You have to ask yourself how we pay for it.”