From ABC: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for some of its part-time U.S. employees in a move aimed at controlling rising health care costs of the nation's largest private employer.
Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.
"We had to make some tough decisions," Sally Wellborn, Wal-Mart's senior vice president of benefits, told The Associated Press.
Wellborn says the company will use a third-party organization to help part-time workers find insurance alternatives: "We are trying to balance the needs of (workers) as well as the costs of (workers) as well as the cost to Wal-Mart."
The announcement comes after Wal-Mart said far more U.S. employees and their families are enrolling in its health care plans than it had expected following rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Wal-Mart, which employs about 1.4 million full- and part-time U.S. workers, says about 1.2 million Wal-Mart workers and family members combined now participate in its health care plan.
That has had an impact on Wal-Mart's bottom line. Wal-Mart now expects the impact of higher health care costs to be about $500 million for the current fiscal year, or about $170 million higher than the original estimate of about $330 million that it gave in February.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/wal-mart-cuts-health-benefits-part-timers-26015112Why is the 30 hour mark magic? That's the ObamaCare cut off as to who receives employee provided health care and who does not.
About a 1 1/2 years ago, Wal-Mart started cutting many hourly employee hours at the local stores. Many of these employees were considered part time but were still getting about 35-40 hours a week and many were receiving health care from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart's health insurance actually is pretty good and at a reasonable price but I guess that's gone now for a lot of people.
Now, Wal-Mart cut those hours to just under 30 hours per week for most of the hourly store workers, and it was all because of ObamaCare.
So, who is to blame? ObamaCare is the number 1 culprit because none of this would have happened without ObamaCare being in place.
And yes, I predicted this in January: http://lasvegasbadger.blogspot.com/2014/01/my-predictions-for-year-2014.html
Number 62.
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