It’s not a loophole in the sense that it’s an unintentional exploit. Everyone involved knew full-well what the point of that provision was. If Congress voted in something more stringent, their corporate donors (e.g., Walmart) would have been pissed. That’s a deal-breaker for most Congress-critters.

It was very distressing watching the news spin it all as being about the ACA when it was definitely much more about his opponent since everyone here already had something analogous to the ACA. But that's how spin works I guess, it's certainly even worse now.

Speaking as a French person, 15% of my pre-income-tax salary sounds close to what I pay for state-sponsored healthcare (I pay more than that, but it includes retirement contributions and stuff).

In the case of the UK where I live, approximately 20% of all government spending goes on healthcare. Taxes on businesses, retail sales, house sales, wealth, capital gains, etc all contribute to the cost of healthcare, not just income taxes. That means a lot less than 15% of anyone's individual tax is spent on it.

However, depending on how you define "socialized", lots of people are covered under several "socialized" programs by the US government, not just Tricare. Medicare (old or disabled people), Medicaid (the very poor), CHIP and things like that (poor kids). Also, if you're counting Tricare, probably any health insurance provided by any level of US government (federal, state, county, city) to government workers should count.

In the end, the US government pays for healthcare (or, at least, much of it—US prices for healthcare are very high, and the way our insurance works means that insurance is just part of how the bills get paid, though a large part) for an high percentage of our population, one way or another.

All those part time jobs would disappear since what kind of employer pay $5-10k per year in insurance premium for an employee who earns $600 per month before taxes?

And you might say “great! Who cares about part time work?” and you’d be wrong, plenty of people don’t need or can do full time work.

There's room for a class of contractors that do small number of hours for many different employers, either many within a quarter or many throughout the year.

One practical alternative would be universal health care.

Within our current system of insanely bad group negotiation for rates, establishing a house cleaning union that could negotiate as a class would probably be the second best alternative.

The third alternative is the Obamacare one, which is to pay your employees at a rate high enough so they can buy their own subsidized insurance on the health exchanges.

Single payer healthcare, not that your question is sincere.

Plenty of people are hired for work like that without forming a business entity, and sometimes under conditions that qualify as employment rather than contract work.

For the sake of conversation, let's consider the cleaner to be an employee and OP to be the employer. Even then, unless OP has 50 full-time and full-time equivalent employees, there is no requirement for the employer to provide group health insurance, according to the ACA.

Obviously if she only has one client that’s not going to be a lot, but it stacks with all the other employers

You would never be obligated to pay for their health insurance, it would be up to them, or their employer, to figure that out.

Walmart on the other hand has clear employees which are expected to turn up to non-negotiable shifts and wear a Walmart specified shifts. They’re currently forced to take on the risks of a contractors, but with none of the freedoms.