When the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) casually released their report on Tuesday, they unknowingly dropped a bombshell: the Affordable Care Act (better known by its real, official name: SocialismIRSIlluminatiCare) is going to KILL 2.5 million jobs over the next decade. This confirmed the suspicions of right-wing conservatives everywhere: Obamacare is nuking jobs and slowing down our economy.
Except it turned out to be completely wrong. By Wednesday afternoon, the CBO director clarified and said that Obamacare will actually reduce unemployment and economists everywhere pointed out that people leaving the workforce doesn’t mean that jobs will be lost. By Thursday morning, most of the articles were about the failed media coverage of the report.
The explanation went like this: Lots of people are “locked” into jobs they hate, or are working in jobs they probably shouldn’t solely because they need healthcare coverage. Michael Hiltzik highlighted the conservative principles/politics behind alleviating “job lock:”
[R]elieving millions of Americans of “job-lock,” which is what the CBO is talking about, is something the GOP has favored for years. In fact, it was a selling point of healthcare proposals they put on the table prior to 2010, when they decided to abandon the field of healthcare reform. For example, listen to Ryan speaking in May 2009: “[The] key question that ought to be addressed in any healthcare reform legislation is, are we going to continue job-lock or are we going to allow individuals more choice and portability to fit the 21st century workforce?”
Liberal journalists — for obvious reasons — were quick to point this out, as were economists, but nobody got into who makes up these 2.5 million people. There’s actually an obvious explanation.
The Census Bureau estimates that there are a lot of people who are working who probably shouldn’t be, almost 6 million in fact. These are people with severe disabilities.
The Census Bureau estimates that there are about 18.7 million working adults in the US who possess a severe disability, and that 5.7 million of them are currently working. There’s a lot to be said about the 10.9 million Americans who are currently on disability; there’s even more to be said about the 5.7 million who work despite possessing a severe impairment that limits their ability to perform a job adequately. What’s not being said is that these workers are the most likely candidates for the supposed 2.5 million people who are going to wander out of the workforce come 2024.
Most of these individuals probably need health insurance to help them pay for their — no doubt — frequent trips to the doctor’s office. In the past, the easiest way to get health insurance that doesn’t discriminate against you for having a pre-existing condition was to get a job (even one that made your condition worse). Thanks to the regulations in Obamacare that explicitly prohibit this discrimination, that’s no longer the case.
I don’t see anything bad about this. You could have a long, philosophical (or maybe not) debate about the virtues of people choosing not to work because they have healthcare, but that would overlook a really valid point that conservatives and liberals have been making for a long time: the employer-based healthcare system sucks; it’s bad for business owners, it’s bad for their employees, and it’s bad for the economy.
Instead of having or even thinking about this debate, I’m going to have a drink on behalf of the 2.5 million people who will finally get healthcare without having to work at a job they probably shouldn’t be working at, and then I’ll have another drink on behalf of the 2,878,000 people who will keep working despite having a severe disability. Because, what’s more American than that?
Email me when David Podhaskie publishes or recommends stories