Health care law hasn’t dented hiring or hours, as critics predicted.

Well, looks light the fear mongering on the right was (yet again) unfounded. The following by Max Ehrenfreund of the Washington Post appeared in the August 13, 2015, StarTribune:

by Kevin LaMarque
by Kevin LaMarque

President Obama’s health care overhaul hasn’t meant less time on the job for workers, according to three newly published studies that challenge one of the main arguments raised by critics of the Affordable Care Act.

One provision requires businesses with more than 50 employees to offer health insurance to those working at least 30 hours a week.

Republicans, and some Democrats, worried that employers would look for ways to get around the mandate, either by giving their employees fewer than 30 hours, or by hiring fewer people.

So far, though, researchers say employers have not changed how they hire and schedule their workers.

“There really hasn’t been nearly the change that some people were expecting,” said Chris Ryan of the payroll-management firm ADP.

ADP analysts studied the payrolls of clients, about 75,000 firms and organizations. They found no overall change in employees’ weekly schedules between 2013 and 2014.

According to ADP’s analysis, scheduling shifts were trivial in every economic sector, even in industries that rely heavily on part-time work.

ADP’s findings were confirmed in another study by Aparna Mathur and Sita Nataraj Slavov of George Mason University and Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Their paper, published this month in the journal Applied Economics Letters, used data from the federal Current Population Survey and finds no statistically significant change in the proportion of part-time workers in the sectors most likely to be affected by the law.

An analysis by Bowen Garrett and Robert Kaestner of the Urban Institute reached largely the same conclusions.

Your can read the original post here.