– By Steve Benham, KATU: Feb 10, 2014

SALEM, Ore. – Concerns about colleges and universities cutting faculty hours to avoid paying health benefits under the new federal health care law has prompted state Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, to introduce legislation to make the practice for all Oregon employers illegal.

Senate Bill 1543 is scheduled to get a hearing before the Senate Health Care and Human Services committee today at 3:00 p.m.

Dembrow, who has taught English at the Cascade campus of Portland Community College for years, told KATU last week he’s heard “through the grapevine” and has read news reports that some community colleges “have been advised to reduce their teachers’ hours” in order to get out of paying health benefits to some employees.

Under the new health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as “Obamacare”), companies that employ 50 or more employees are required to provide their workers with health insurance if they work an average of 30 hours or more a week…

Our Response & Your Comments

We’ll ignore the delicious irony of colleges, probably the single biggest institutional fans of ObamaCare, slashing professors’ hours to get out of paying for…ObamaCare!

Our larger point is that laws like these are the steroids that drive government hyper-growth. Here’s why…

First they pass ObamaCare, which is 2200 pages of dizzying complexities, dazzling contradictions and unintended consequences. Now you need more laws to clean up the complexities, contradictions and, most of all, unintended consequences. Thus emerges from the swamp Dembrow’s bill.

Then the new law demands  more government to make it work. How do you prove in court that

State U cut Prof. Propellerhead’s hours to avoid paying his ObamaCare bill? Hire psychiatrists to muck about in his brain? Plus you need investigators to hunt down evidence. They need lawyers, offices and assistants. Plus you need new laws to empower the investigators and lawers. And the beat goes on and on –  as government matasaticizes at your expense.