WSFA.com Montgomery Alabama news.

Alabama school systems have yet another problem. It started coming into focus last year. They can’t afford substitute teachers. At least they can’t work them more than 30 hours per week. Otherwise, the American Affordable Care Act requires them to provide these substitutes health insurance. Marshall County Superintendent Tim Nabors described what they were up against in 2014.

Nabors said ObamaCare will affect the availability of substitute teachers in the school system due to the requirement that anyone working over 30 hours a week be offered full-time status and benefits. “It’s difficult to find the subs that we need… When they can work only so many hours a week it puts a bigger burden,” Nabors said. “If they work over that [30 hours a week] then we have to either offer them insurance, or we have to pay a fine.”

Autauga County school employees describe these problems in greater detail. Here’s how Obamacare has made healthcare affordable in the suburbs near Montgomery.

Because the school system cannot afford to pay the estimated $10,000 per substitute per year cost of providing health insurance to any sub working more than 30 hours a week, classes often have to double up, or full-time teachers must take turns popping in during their planning periods to create a patchwork cover for the children whose teacher is out. “We have substitute teachers that want and depend on this money,” said system superintendent Spence Agee who outright blames ObamaCare for the dilemma. “We just wouldn’t have any money to operate; we couldn’t turn the lights on.” According to the WSFA report, failing to comply with the law’s onerous requirements would cause a $2 million fine to be levied on the school system—an amount that the school system says it can’t afford either.

So we force employers to insure part-timers or pay a fine. That obviously makes sure all of their employees have insurance. It just doesn’t take into account the hard, unpleasant conversation that the accounting department will have with the Superintendent. This conversation results in their being far fewer employees. That way, every employee has insurance and nobody pays a fine.

Now the nice people who gave us all this affordable healthcare didn’t *mean* for this nastiness to occur. Their intentions were as pure as the driven snow. By making these poor, threadbare, school districts insure all these substitutes, there would be no such thing as an uninsured worker. There aren’t as many uninsured workers. Oh, wait…there just aren’t as many workers. Funny how all those good intentions paved far more miles of road than did The American Recovery Act. The only hitch comes in where that road typically makes you get off.