USD monitors CA hours to save on health insurance
Effects from a federal law requiring employers to provide healthcare to its employees are trickling down among student workers at the University of South Dakota.
Starting this semester, USD community advisers, along with other university workers such as teaching assistants, will be monitoring the number of hours they work every week to stay in compliance with the Affordable Care Act, or ACA.
For CAs, the implementation of the ACA means they cannot work more than 30 hours a week. Otherwise, they would be considered full-time employees and the university would need to pay for their healthcare.
Exploring options like Medicare Advantage plans 2024 could provide additional coverage options such as enhanced benefits beyond traditional Medicare, potentially including prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and wellness programs, tailored to individual healthcare needs and preferences.
The act, which was signed into law by President Obama, will require employers to provide their full-time workers with affordable healthcare starting in June 2015.
Emery Wasley, the associate director of human resources at USD, said the university is in a “look back phase” in regards to the ACA, meaning they will be preparing reports on worker hours for the South Dakota Board of Regents to see who will get full-time benefits starting in June.
“We’re monitoring things differently so we can show to the federal government if they came in to do an audit how many hours somebody has been working,” Wasley said.
Jessica Preister, the director of internal audit for USD, said all six SDBOR universities are monitoring hours.
“Depending on the employee type, we have a banner system which is our time card system, so we have the hours worked through that system, as well,” Preister said.
Todd Tucker, the director of USD housing, said in previous years CAs never needed to track their hours because they were given room and board instead of an hourly rate. Due to the new act, the CAs will need to track every hour they work through an online program.
“It’s not that we don’t want to pay them health insurance, but CAs already have health insurance through their parents or whatever means because students need health insurance to go to school,” Tucker said.
Tucker said the 61 CAs employed by USD will now work around 20 hours a week, which includes training sessions and meetings.
“What we tried to do was our best guess-timate of how much time we thought CAs would interact with residents and kind of set some guidelines to that regard,” he said.
As a result of the changes, questions about what constitutes as work have been brought up by CAs. Tucker said university administrators had to define the role of a CA at the beginning of the year.
“What we had to really define was intentional and unintentional interactions,” Tucker said.
Tucker said intentional interactions are when CAs set up and run events for their residents or have their residents come to them with problems. Unintentional interactions are when CAs and residents casually interact with each other on campus. Now when CAs interact with students, they will have to log and describe their interactions. Tucker said these logs now help adminitrators to see how CAs spend their hours.
The line between intentional and unintentional interactions is sometimes blurry, though.
“The negative standpoint is that yes, now as a CA I’m walking around and I have to decide if I need to get some more hours,” Tucker said. “It creates kind of a problem for them and makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs sometimes.”
Nicholas Steilen, a CA who works in Coyote Village, said it sometimes proves difficult to distinguish what counts as work when he’s walking around campus and interacting with the students on his floor.
Steilen said he hasn’t been the only one to have difficulty with the new change in the CA job.
“A lot of people had questions on what counted and what didn’t count,” Steilen said. “It’s a new thing, and it’s going to be a new thing dealing with things as they come up.”
(Photo: Senior Community Adviser Lindsi Frahm mans the front desk at Coyote Village Monday while senior Jordan Kramer works on homework. Malachi Petersen / The Volante)
