“What kind of economy do you want? Do you want one where people are working more hours for themselves and their families? Or do you want one where some people are going to be working more hours to pay for the subsidies, and some people are going to be working fewer hours but they’ll have health care?”
Ben Domenech of the Heartland Institute appears on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes this week to discuss Obamacare costs and the implications of the CBO report.
This is an excellent breakdown of exactly what the implications are of the CBO report and what Obamacare means for the work force in the future. The above quote is a key take-away. Hayes is arguing that it’s good that people don’t have to work more hours simply to ensure they have health insurance. Domenech argues that it’s not a good thing when some people have to work more hours to pay for the subsidies so other people can work fewer hours and still get healthcare. Taking more labor from some to pay for less labor from others. Gee, where have we heard this sort of philosophy before?
DOMENECH: The problem here is about labor force participation. It’s not about some new aspect of Obamacare that’s been discovered that’s killing jobs. This is CBO basically going back and looking at the prediction they gave us a few years ago, when they said that about 800,000 equivalent full time would drop out of the labor force because of Obamacare. This is them looking at it again after new research that’s been done by Harvard, by M.I.T. scholars, by the University of Chicago in particular that essentially found that the effect was going to be far more dramatic, in part this because of the effect of subsidies on the marketplace but it’s really driven by the fact that Obamacare is behaving differently than Romneycare in a couple of key ways, which was the basis for the earlier CBO assumption.
HAYES: That is a really good point. I think actually this is where we get to a genuine point of contention. Let’s separate out two kinds of ways in which peoplel might choose to work less because of Obamacare. One which a lot of people talking about is this early retirement, which you’ve seen a lot. I’ve heard a lot of people saying, i’m working until i’m on Medicare, that is a very common thing you hear. There’s a certain amount of people that the presence of Obamacare means I have guaranteed issue, i’m 60, 61, I can leave my job and I can have health care, I don’t have to stay locked in this job for healthcare. that to me seems like a net benefit, do you agree with that?
Via: The Right Scoop
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