Heritage
Foundation
She
Dreamed Obamacare Was Harmless
Amy
Payne
February
19, 2014
Obamacare
is working, and it’s not costing any jobs.
Shhh…keep
quiet, or you’ll wake Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius from her dream.
“There
is absolutely no evidence, and every economist will tell you this,
that there is any job loss related to the Affordable Care Act,” she
said on Monday.
In
the land of the waking, Heritage’s James Sherk—an economist who
doesn’t fall under “every economist,” according to
Sebelius—plainly states that “The Affordable Care Act has
discouraged companies from creating jobs and workers from accepting
them.”
There
are mountains of evidence—from businesses’ reports to the Federal
Reserve to this list compiled by Investor’s Business Daily. And the
stories keep coming: Just yesterday, an industry trade group
estimated that Obamacare’s medical device tax has killed 33,000
jobs.
Obamacare’s
job vise squeezes Americans from both sides: the employer side and
the employee side.
Employers
Despite
delays of the employer mandate, Sherk and Jacob Deveney write,
“Employers are responding to the uncertainty of the Obamacare
rollout by slashing hours and limiting their new hires.” That
includes state and local governments, too.
Why?
Sherk explains:
Obamacare
will also encourage businesses to create part-time jobs instead of
full-time jobs. Employers only pay the penalty on full-time workers.
If they cut workers’ hours to part-time status, they owe no fines.
So full-time jobs will become harder to come by when the penalties
kick in.
Employees
While
employers might not be hiring (or might be hiring only for part-time
positions), would-be employees have a say in this equation, too. And
Obamacare actually encourages them to work fewer hours.
The
Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the law’s health
care subsidies would push the equivalent of 2.3 million workers out
of the workforce. Simply put, making less money means you can qualify
for more taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies. But if you start making
more, your subsidy drops.
These
Americans find working more does not pay if it means fewer benefits.
So they either drop to part-time or drop out of the labor market.
They would prefer to work, but not if the government claws back
three-quarters of what they would make through greater taxes and
reduced benefits.
Perhaps
Obamacare is actually a match made in heaven—it makes employers
want to hire for fewer hours and employees want to work fewer hours.
But that’s acceptable only if unemployed Americans sound like a
dream come true.
Read
this and other articles at Heritage Foundation
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