It’s the second year of Obamacare, and the insurance plan cancellation letters just keep coming. IWF Executive Director Sabrina Schaeffer recently wrote in Forbes that her family’s plan was cancelled, and they’ll be paying $500 more a month for a one-size-fits-all government plan that doesn’t come close to fitting their need.

It’s no wonder, as House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline writes, that “Americans are more displeased than ever with the president’s health care law.” Yet a growing number of schools nationwide are also suffering negative side effects of this ill-conceived law.

As I wrote last month, the Roanoke City Public Schools Board recently voted to outsource substitute teachers to a New Jersey-based company because the compliance costs of Obamacare were just too steep. Kline explains that these schools aren’t the only ones turning to private staffing companies in search of affordable substitutes:  

In Louisiana, administrators are being forced to cut staff hours to keep their schools afloat and their students in the classroom . … n New Jersey, school districts are even being forced to outsource their substitute teaching. … As has been said time and again, the nation’s students and teachers deserve better.

Organizations such as the country’s largest Teachers union, the National Education Association, were staunch supporters of the “Affordable” Care Act, calling health care reform “a crucial ingredient for successful public schools.”

Teachers whose benefits, hours, and even jobs are now being cut as a direct result of this “reform” should keep those words in mind.

Yet Kline explains that two proposals are in the works to help. One is the Save American Workers Act (H.R. 2575) “to restore the 40-hour work week.  Another proposal would simply exempt schools from the employer mandate, providing relief from one of the law’s most onerous mandates.”

We were promised these sorts of things wouldn’t happen. Helping save people’s jobs through exemptions and work guarantees should be a first step—not the last.

The best possible policy solution is to exempt all of us from Obamacare by ending it. Period.

Any public assistance for those who cannot afford the healthcare they need should be directed to individuals in the form of health savings accounts (HSAs). Market barriers to affordable, accountable insurance plans should be removed, and government should, quite frankly, stop playing doctor.

After all, the cardinal rule of the medical profession is first do no harm.