Obamacare and Restaurant Workers May Finally Be Getting Along

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 14:38:23 PDT

When it comes to the relationship between the restaurant industry and the Affordable Care Act, the flavor profile (as the epicurian might say) has been decidedly bitter, so it’s nice to come across a bit of a sweet note.

As the industry's arguement goes, with the very thin margins restaurants operate on, being required to cover employees healthcare would wreck their businesses. But in Washington, D.C., Alisa Kleinmann—a 33-year-old mother of two, former meeting planner, and private chef, and currently the founder and CEO the hospitality trade organization Industree—may have found a solution to this very personal problem. Her 35-year-old husband is a bartender at D.C. hotspot Graffiato—and he’s never had health insurance.

“I just kept thinking, something has to change,” Kleinmann told the Washington Post. “Something has to get better.”

Rather than wait around for a visit from the health insurance fairy, however, the entrepreneurial Kleinmann decided to take matters into her own hands. While the state and federal government run their own public health care exchanges to help people compare plans and enroll for health insurance in a competitive setting, private health care exchanges have been established by businesses to provide a similar parketplace for their employees. Working with M&T Insurance Agency and Liazon, which operates a number of these private health insurance exchanges, Kleinmann managed to build what may very well be the first insurance exchange designed specifically for the restaurant industry, going so far as to become a licensed insurance broker herself so she could oversee the process.

This week, Kleinmann debuted Industree Exchange, which is currently set up for Washington, D.C.–area restaurants with 100 or more employees. Owners of such establishments face a January 1, 2015 deadline to offer full-time workers coverage under the health care law, which restaurants with 50–99 workers have until the start of 2016 to comply.

“Every single option has been designed, negotiated and built specifically for the demographics of the restaurant industry,” Kleinmann tell the Post. “They keep you in compliance with Obamacare, and they’re completely affordable.”

Up to 20 full-coverage options provided by big-name insurers like United Healthcare, Aetna, and Cigna are available, while there are a number of so-called “skinny plans” to choose from as well, which provide minimum ACA coverage for $61 to $91 per month. The choice of bare-bones plans no doubt reflects the preponderance of “young invincibles” working in the industry—the twentysomethings that healthcare reform advocates have been trying desperately to convince to pay something, anything, for some form of coverage. A white paper out of Georgetown found that 43 percent of the U.S. restaurant workforce is under the age of 26.

Already, some D.C.-area restaurateurs are clamoring to sign up for the plans.

“When Obamacare was passed, we became very concerned about how we were going to pay for coverage for our employees,” Frank T. Shull, a partner and chief operating officer at RW Restaurant Group, told the Post. Shull’s company operates seven restaurants and has 250 full-time employees. At $400 per month per employee, the company was looking at a $100,000 per month bill to extend coverage to full-timers under its current health plan. With Industree Exchange, it can offer basic insurance for a quarter of that.

“We want our employees to have health-care, but it had to be affordable,” Shull tells the Post. “We have seven restaurants, but we’re not a big company like IBM.”

Like I said, it’s sure nice to hear that someone, somewhere is working to provide better coverage under the new healthcare law to restaurant workers, because on the whole, the industry has been doing pretty much everything it can to shirk its responsibility. And we’re talking about more than just that lame, politically motivated publicity stunt by Papa John’s CEO (and big Mitt Romney supporter) John Schnatter during the last presidential campaign, who claimed Obamacare would force the chain to raise the price of its pizzas. (Heaven forbid!)

Yes, as the industry argues, its workers may be younger, more transient, and work more variable hours than in other sectors, but if, for example, 43 percent are under the age of 26, that leaves 57 percent who aren’t. And the industry ranks among the worst for providing health insurance to its employees, with an estimated 80 to 90 percent of workers uninsured.

A recent report by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, which advocates for better working conditions for restaurant employees, charts the campaign of ferocious opposition launched by the National Restaurant Association (dubbed “the other NRA” by ROC-United) to healthcare reform. After its all-out effort to defeat the law failed back in 2010, the NRA has nevertheless continued to press on, filing an amicus brief with the Supreme Court calling on the high court to overturn the law in 2012 (also failed), and now lobbying Congress to roll back certain key provisions. It most notably current push is to change the law’s definition of “full-time equivalent” employee to 40 hours worked per week from the current 30 hours—which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would cause about a million employees to loose their employer-based health coverage.

That seems to be exactly the opposite direction we should be headed.

Free Range is a bi-weekly column that covers the oftentimes weird and sometimes wonderful world of food industry news. From the new limited-time fast-food menu items to the frontlines of the battle over restaurant wages, Free Range is your source for news and commentary on the latest in food. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the views of Participant Media. 

Related stories on TakePart:

• Who Ordered ‘Health and Wellness’ for Dinner?

• OK, We All Know Tipping in Restaurants Is Ridiculous—Right?

• Is Restaurant Tipping the Worst?

• Does Obamacare Really Need to Result in Bigger Restaurant Bills?

Original article from TakePart