This is why we needed, at the very least a public option, if not single payer healthcare (boldface mine):

Starting next year, Obamacare will require companies that employ more than 50 full-time workers to provide health insurance to employees who work 30 or more hours a week, or else pay a fine.

But what’s an “hour” for a college teacher? Depending on the subject matter, level of interaction with students and other factors, one hour in the classroom can require two, three or more hours of preparation, grading, conferences and so on.

“How do we account for all that time? How do we measure it?” asks David Baime, senior vice president for governmental relations for the American Association of Community Colleges, which represents 1,167 institutions nationwide. “With almost 70 percent of our (classroom) credits now taught by adjuncts, the colleges are extremely concerned about how the law will be interpreted and the extra costs they might get hit with.”

The Internal Revenue Service will hold a public hearing April 23 in Washington on this issue to attempt to sort out the concerns of the colleges and give them better guidance. But many schools are already planning out the 2013-14 school year, and some are erring on the side of caution, pre-emptively altering schedules and throwing some teachers into a panic.

Oakton Community College, with campuses in Des Plaines and Skokie, last month announced it would be cutting the hours of certain particularly active adjunct teachers starting this summer in order to make sure they won’t qualify as full-time employees under the Obamacare threshold when it kicks in.

…here’s the problem these teachers face: They’re already at the low end of the pay scale — a typical adjunct teaching two classes that meet four hours a week might make $8,000 for a semester, with no job benefits — and now they’re being told they’re going to make even less money right when the law will compel them to buy insurance.

“It’s a double whammy,” said Bill Silver, an Illinois Education Association union representative who’s helping organize Friday’s rally. “They’ll be earning 30 to 70 percent less money, then being told to go buy their (health) insurance on the exchanges.”

Those of us who experienced Romneycare, the model for Obamacare, have been saying from day one that, for low-income workers, this is not affordable. While it’s nice to see the pundit class slowly coming around to single-payer, it’s too little, too late.

Of course, we were only Dirty Fucking Hippies, so what did we know?