SACRAMENTO – The California Assembly will likely vote this week on whether to prevent big employers from slashing work hours in order to not offer health insurance, Nation’s Restaurant News reports. Assembly Bill 880 would shut the “Walmart loophole,” in which companies would reduce hours for workers from full time to part time. The part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) that requires those working 30 hours or more per week to be eligible for health care goes into effect in 2014.

California Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez introduced the bill in February. The bill has garnered opponents, such as the California Restaurant Association and the Alliance for a Healthy California, which labeled the measure a “scare tactic.” 

“The Affordable Care Act hasn’t even been implemented yet, so employers won’t be reducing their hours to get around it, and there’s no evidence that will happen,” said Becky Warren, an Alliance spokesman. “We don’t believe there is a loophole.”

The federal PPACA requires companies with more than 50 full-time employees to give health insurance to those working at least 30 hours weekly or 130 hours per month. The U.S. Senate is considering legislation that would increase that to 174 hours monthly or 40 hours weekly.

The California bill applies only to employers with 500 or more full- or part-time employees in the state. Retailers would be fined for any worker — even one logging as few as eight hours weekly — who picks the state’s Medicaid coverage (Medi-Cal). Gomez contends that employers don’t have to pay when employees pick Medi-Cal, and his aim is to halt state taxpayer funding of health insurance for those large employers.