Workers At Target Realize They Can’t Keep Their Plan If They Like It

Part-time employees at Target can expect to pay more for their health insurance. Everyone’s favorite retailer recently announced it will drop health care coverage for its part-time employees in April. Target Corp. pointed to ObamaCare’s regulatory burden as the reason for ending their employer-provided health care for some.

“Health-care reform is transforming the benefits landscape and affecting how all employers, including Target, administer health benefits coverage,” said Jodee Kozlak, Target’s Executive Vice President of Human Resources.

Target joins a growing list of dozens of U.S. retailers, including Trader Joe’s Co., Walgreens Co, and Home Depot Inc. that have been forced to cut their employees’ health benefits because of ObamaCare.

Now even more Americans can say that the President Obama broke his “If you like your plan, you can keep it” promise. House Democrats, meanwhile, continue to deny that ObamaCare is wreaking havoc across the country and stunting economic growth.

From Bloomberg:

Target Corp. (TGT) will end health insurance for part-time employees in April, joining Trader Joe’s Co., Home Depot Inc. and other U.S. retailers that have scaled back benefits in response to changes from Obamacare.

About 10 percent of part-time employees, defined as those working fewer than 30 hours a week, use Target’s health plans now, according to a posting yesterday on the Minneapolis-based company’s website. Target is the second-largest U.S. discount retailer by sales and had about 361,000 total employees last fiscal year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the largest regulatory overhaul of health care since the 1960s, creating a system of penalties and rewards to encourage people to obtain medical insurance. The law known as Obamacare doesn’t require most companies to cover part-time workers, and offering them health plans may disqualify those people from subsidies in new government-run insurance exchanges that opened in October.

“You see a lot of retailers making adjustments in contemplation of the full effect of the employer mandate penalties in 2015,” Neil Trautwein, a lobbyist with the National Retail Federation, a trade group in Washington, said in a phone interview. “Even though it is not effective yet, it is already having an effect on the job market and putting companies where they would probably not otherwise want to be.”