The Affordable Care Act includes a tax on high-cost insurance plans that’s both a funding mechanism for the law and meant to encourage patients with a menu of generous health benefits to choose only necessary services. But the tax could wind uphurting workers who pay premium dollars for not-so-premium health plans, according to a new report from the left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute.

“[The tax] was sold as being on ‘Cadillac Coverage.’ The idea was that there were some people out there that are getting thousands and thousands of dollars worth health insurance premiums,” said Elise Gould, the director of health policy research at EPI and the author of the report. “But the reality is that health insurance premiums can be expensive for many different reasons, not just because they have generous coverage.”

Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, says the new provision won’t affect most workers. But studies show about 2 million workers could potentially get fewer hours — and therefore remain without health insurance.

“Workforces that are based on part-time work, a lot of those workers already are not eligible,” Gould says. But, she adds, “to the extent that they have some workers that are working, say, 32 hours a week, are they going to move them down? Absolutely. Those are the workers that are most at risk.”

Elise Gould, a health care economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said she expects the effects of the employer mandate to be minimal.

“I don’t think that it is going to lead to much job loss,” she said. “There may be some shifting in hours to avoid the mandate. I think that would be small though.”

Gould also added that she expects employers to take many different factors into account when considering expansion, with the insurance requirement being just one small factor.

Critics of the account-based plans complain that the account-based plans reward healthier employees while putting those who are poorer and suffer from chronic diseases at risk. This is because the emphasis in these plans tends to be on preventative medicine. “Well visits tend to be covered but not pharmaceuticals, and those who can’t afford to pay out of pocket stop taking their pills,” says Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.

In 2011, 58.3 percent of the nation’s workers under 65 had job-based health insurance, according to a report released Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute.

That marks a decline of 0.3 percentage points from the previous year, after precipitous declines starting in 2008, when companies were laying off workers, shuttering plants or going out of business in the wake of the global financial crisis.

“What is so clear is that workers have lost bargaining power,” said Elise Gould, author of the study and director of health policy research at the Washington-based think tank. “There are so many workers for every job out there, and workers don’t have any way to get higher wages or better benefits. That’s why that trend is not going to improve.”