Affordable Care Act Gives Workers Freedom; Republicans Enraged
Paul Waldman captures it succinctly: “Some Americans will leave the labor force when they can do so and still have health insurance. And it’s a good thing.”
Look, the Republicans hate Obamacare. I get that. I don’t understand how you decide that it’s advantageous (or decent) to position your party against Americans getting health care. But it’s no secret that they hate it. So at some point doesn’t the eagerness to spin every piece of data as a stake through the heart of ObamaCare become so transparent that people stop listening?
When this week’s CBO report came out, including the assessment that the ACA would have the effect of reducing hours worked by the equivalent of 2 million full time jobs, they jumped all over it as the latest smoking gun. Paul Krugman puts it this way:
…politicians and, I’m sorry to say, all too many news organizations immediately seized on the 2 million number and utterly misrepresented its meaning. For example, Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, quickly posted this on his Twitter account: “Under Obamacare, millions of hardworking Americans will lose their jobs and those who keep them will see their hours and wages reduced.”
Not a word of this claim was true.
Right. The trouble is, it takes what EJ Dionne calls “willful stupidity” to see that reduction of hours as the catastrophe they want it to be.
One of the best arguments for health-insurance reform is that our traditional employer-based system often locked people into jobs they wanted to leave but couldn’t because they feared they wouldn’t be able to get affordable coverage elsewhere.
This worry was pronounced for people with preexisting conditions, but it was not limited to them. Consider families with young children in which one parent would like to get out of the formal labor market for a while to take care of the kids. In the old system, the choices of such couples were constrained if only one of the two received employer-provided family coverage.
Or ponder the fate of a 64-year-old with a condition that leaves her in great pain. She has the savings to retire but can’t exercise this option until she is eligible for Medicare. Is it a good thing to force her to stay in her job? Is it bad to open her job to someone else?
By broadening access to health insurance, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ends the tyranny of “job lock,” which is what the much-misrepresented Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study of the law released Tuesday shows.
On Wednesday, Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said the obvious: losing your job and choosing to work less aren’t the same thing. If you lose your job, you suffer immense personal and financial hardship. If, on the other hand, you choose to work less and spend more time with your family, “we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.”
And now you know everything you need to know about the latest falsehood in the ever-mendacious campaign against health reform.
There’s more from many others. I always appreciate the perspective Jonathan Cohn offers. And Ezra Klein summed it up nicely, here:
In context, the freakout over the CBO estimate is perverse. Is it really the Republican position that we should do nothing – – in fact, cut aid — for the millions of long-term unemployed, but express shock and terror that employed people will, in a few years, cut back their hours or leave the labor force by choice? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about people desperate to join the workforce, who can’t, than about people voluntarily leaving the workforce, who can?
Right. They blather on about this pretend issue and at the same time they filibuster help for the long-term unemployed. Again.
Once more, why would a decent person choose to line up with these guys?
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