With colleges and universities recruiting more adjunct professors, schools have been able to reduce the costly expenses of large salary and benefit packages that are typically associated with full-time employees. Yet, schools have started to re-evaluate their use of adjunct professors in order to comply with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), demanding that employers provide affordable health coverage for all of their full-time employees, which includes anyone working 30 hours or more.
Signed in 2010, President Obama initiated the Affordable Care Act, dubbed “Obamacare,” as a mechanism to provide all citizens the option to afford health insurance. After several years of insurance companies abusing consumers through misleading practices, the Obama administration initiated a mandate that required private insurers to supply their consumers with the option of a “premium package,” particularly if they require extensive health needs. While major coverage requirements, including the employer mandate, will not become effective until January 2014, employers are still working proactively in anticipation of the new regulations.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius notes that the new health care coverage law gave tax credits to 360,000 small businesses. According to Sebelius, the new tax credits will allow businesses, including higher education institutions, an “opportunity to give their employees coverage and an array of affordable, private insurance plans to choose from.”
Sebelius remarks, “That’s what change looks like.”
Although for higher education institutions, “change” appears in their redefined concept of a full-time worker. Faculty who typically work more than 30 hours are now able to take advantage of health insurance packages that adequately suit their health care needs, including those contingent faculty who dangle between the lines of working 30 to 35 hours a week.
In public schools around the nation, two-thirds of the faculty consists of contingent instructors. As such, schools are under immense pressure to carve out room in their budgets to accommodate health coverage for all employees working more than 30 hours. However, the problem for schools is not merely in their hesitation to withhold money. For higher education institutions, a typical benefits package for a regular, full-time, employee can cost an additional 25 to 30 percent of the employee’s base salary. Several schools fighting the rising costs of higher education are not financially equipped to allocate that amount to each adjunct professor.
In order to ensure that higher education administrations are not compromising their budgets, the IRS under Obama’s administration has proposed possible methods of measuring an employee as full-time, and thus, eligible for employer-based coverage. The IRS created a “safe harbor” for employers to determine whether or not employees meet the 30-hour requisite. Under this proposal, employers have the option of using a 3-12 month period where they can decide which employers are considered a variable-hour staff member — one that doesn’t regularly work a 30-hour week — or a seasonal employee who typically meets the 30-hour threshold. During this measurement period, schools are not required to supply coverage. However, directly after the determination period, schools will need to implement the ACA regulations.
