is certainly not an incentive for them to provide health insurance. Plus, for part-time employees, it's only $375.

Sounds like an incentive to part-time-ize your work force.

Also, from the AP story (you don't think I'm mad enough to link it, do you???)

"The same provision [the fines] is also estimated to greatly reduce that number of workers whose employers would drop coverage [...]"

Say WHA?

Because of the stigma attached to paying a fine, versus the expense of paying for health insurance, even at group rates?

Someone please explain this to me.

in massachusetts the fine is only $295.

of course, instead of firing people, they just lowered their wages so their employees would qualify for medicaid, among other things to avoid the fines.

of the "logic" that turns everybody making more than 101% of minimum wage into a "contract employee" -- thus putting the ENTIRE cost of health insurance, FICA, Social Security, and retirement benefits on the working person, and absolving the employer of all responsibility for paying any benefits, matching, or contributions.

junior college I was then attending, at minimum wage plus one percent.

Did not make enough in that semester to need to declare income for tax purposes.
Did make enough not to have to borrow money for books the following term. Don't think I could do that today (books cost so much more).

To be a legitimate contract laborer, the employer must not direct hours, control the work place, or control the work, etc. I have a few people I employ like that, but it's because they work out of their homes or otherwise with such independence that supervision, control of the work site, safety, etc. is essentially impossible. The penalty for falsely treating an employee as a contractor is severe, although I can't recall what it is. I get audited by my worker's comp carrier annually about this, among other things. They are making sure that they get paid. I do not know what the result would be nationally, and there may be places where enforcement is so lax as to be laughable.

I agree that employers will game the system - I would expect that would take the form of part time workers.

1. Insurers keep gaming the system by collecting premiums, denying care, and adverse selection;

2. Employers start gaming the system by turning full-timers with insurance into part-timers or contractors without insurance;

3. The Dems pass a mandate that everybody has to buy insurance, and also tax health benefits;

4. The Dems make sure that the public "plan" (or "option," wev) can't really compete with the private plans (since they believe, as a matter of policy, that this shouldn't happen);

5. The country's worse off than before. The insurers manage to shove even more "losses" onto the taxpayer; the tax revenues from taxing benefits decrease, because the employers offer fewer employees benefits and employment never recovers in America's lost decade; since the revenues for subsidies decrease, the subsidies for buying insurance are never enough; so everybody to whom a few thousand in tax refunds matters buys a policy in the newly created market for crappy non-insurance; and everybody who doesn't get a refund goes naked and waits for the lien -- or waits to be refused care in the ER, once Obama's Electronic Medical Records thing kicks in, and everybody is bar-coded before getting treatment. At that point, people start dying in public, and the shooting begins. Yay!