The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Tuesday that the Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.5 million over the next decade. That is mostly a good thing, a liberating result of the law. Of course, Republicans immediately tried to brand the findings as “devastating†and stark evidence of President Obama’s health care reform as a failure and a job killer. It is no such thing.
The report estimated that — thanks to an increase in insurance coverage under the act and the availability of subsidies to help pay the premiums — many workers who felt obliged to stay in a job that provided health benefits would now be able to leave those jobs or choose to work fewer hours than they otherwise would have. In other words, the report is about the choices workers can make when they are no longer tethered to an employer because of health benefits. The cumulative effect on the labor supply is the equivalent of 2.5 million fewer full-time workers by 2024.
Which also seems to suggest that there will be 2.5 million job openings that other people might fill. Sounds like a win/win to me.
As soon as the CBO report was released, wingnut media were running headlines about Congressional Budget Office sends death blow to ObamaCare and The Jobless Care Act: Congress’s budget office says ObamaCare will increase unemployment, claiming that 2.5 million people would be fired because of Obamacare. And this is a lie.
This lie is so egregious that even Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post‘s false equivalency finder fact checker, says it’s a lie. Being Glen Kessler he manages to find some bullshit reason to give the lie only three pinnochios instead of five, but for Kessler to pin three pinnochios on Republicans is pretty amazing.
In fact, even Paul Ryan has admitted that the report says people would choose to work less, not that people would be fired from jobs. Imagine. I’m sure he’ll come up with some other way to demagogue the numbers, but this may mean that either the “jobless act” lie will die rather quickly on the vine, or Ryan’s unearned reputation as a “policy wonk” will soon be called into question by the Right.
Orrin Hatch, touted the CBO report with the lie, saying it would lead to two million fewer jobs, then turned around and trashed the report for saying that a part of Obamacare Republicans have been calling an insurance company bailout will save the government mpney.
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Tuesday threw a potential wrench into House Republican plans to tie an elimination of ObamaCare risk corridors to the next debt-ceiling increase.
The CBO now says that the program, which critics deride as an insurance “bailout,” will earn the government $8 billion over the 2015 to 2017 period. Last May, the CBO said that the program had not net budgetary effect.
The government will pay insurers $8 billion over the period but will collect $16 billion in return from companies, yielding a net benefit.
Another day, another faux scandal.