This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 29th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to deliver comprehensive health coverage to millions more full-time workers, the reality for many workers is that

their hours are being cut to below full-time.

Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute explains why.

So one of the things that Obamacare was going to achieve is it was going to force employers

to offer comprehensive coverage to all full-time workers,

and they were going to make sure that that was really all full-time workers

because they defined full-time is 30 hours per week.

Anything above that is full-time, anything below that is part-time, and the employer mandate

in Obamacare applies to all employees working more than 30 hours per week.

While the law of unintended consequences took hold, in fact it's taken hold before

Obamacare and the employer mandate even took effect.

And what employers are doing is in order to avoid those penalties,

they are taking workers from above 30 hours per week

to below 30 hours per week.

So this tax really hasn't even taken effect yet.

It doesn't take effect until 2014,

but people are already losing hours and losing income because employers have to adjust

their workforces in order to avoid these penalties.

There's a supermarket in Wisconsin

that said that they would have to,

they would go out of business if they didn't

...