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Save American Workers Act of 2014

Floor Speech

By: Phil Roe
By: Phil Roe
Date: April 2, 2014
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Business and Consumers Employment and Affirmative Action Health Insurance

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Mr. ROE of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, this bill would repeal ObamaCare's mandate on employers to provide insurance to all employees working at least 30 hours per week and would instead restore the traditional 40-hour standard. Everywhere I go, I hear concerns about the lack of jobs and the need for job creation. Tennessee's unemployment rate is still near 7 percent. We need to be doing everything possible to encourage employers to not only create jobs, but to maintain current jobs.

That is why the 30-hour standard makes no sense. Employers are already struggling to make their budgets work in the stagnant Obama economy. We all know how the employers are forced to respond: by cutting hours or hiring fewer workers. There is concrete evidence this is already happening, not just in the private sector. In my own hometown, Johnson, Tennessee, where I was mayor before I came here, the city school system been forced to keep approximately 200 employees, including substitute teachers, below the 129 hours a month.

This hurts the families that count on that income and the schoolchildren that benefit from the efforts of these adults.

President Obama's case for defending this flawed law is built on a false premise: that there is no other way to help individuals who cannot afford health insurance or who have been affected by a catastrophic illness or disease.

Mr. Speaker, I have spent my entire adult life as a physician taking care of people from all walks of life. I want every American to have access to an affordable health care plan, and I have worked since I arrived in Congress to develop patient-centered solutions to help people afford health care, like H.R. 3121, the American Health Care Reform Act.

There are ways to reach this goal without creating massive new bureaucracies, spending $2 trillion, weakening the doctor-patient relationship, or increasing premiums for millions of hardworking Americans, but the President won't even engage in a conversation. So, in the meantime, we must do everything we can to protect the American people from this law. That is why I encourage my colleagues to support this bill.

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