Obamacare kills 2 million jobs? Uh, no. Not at all.
MSNBC.com
Enemies of President Obama’s signature legislation, The Affordable Care Act (ACA), have seized on a recently publicized report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) which claims the ACA will cause a reduction of 2 million jobs over the next 10 years. Republicans across the spectrum are claiming they warned the American people about this disaster of a law, but they are hoping the public will not know the difference between rhetoric and reality. The CBO report says there will be a reduction in 2 million jobs, but that is because people will be leaving the workforce as an individual being forced to work a certain amount of hours to maintain health insurance is no longer legal. Additionally an individual no longer is required to be a full-time worker to be eligible for insurance. These changes do not mean that employers will be hiring less, but that workers will choose to work fewer hours. From the report:
The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).
The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell featured policy expert Ezra Klein who broke down this information in even more detail: