Afternoon Must-Read: Jonathan Chait: Obamacare, Jobs, and ‘What Matters Politically’
Jonathan Chait: Obamacare, Jobs, and ‘What Matters Politically’: “Imagine that the United States had a national health-care system in place for long enough that it was no longer the subject of frenetic controversy….
Now imagine a new president just proposed to eliminate that system and replace it with the one that has existed in the United States until January 1 of this year. Then suppose the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the effect of this plan on the labor market…. Would the firestorm of terrible headlines about Obamacare killing jobs that dominated the actual news yesterday be, in this imagined world, a heavenly chorus of hallelujahs?… There would be more people working, more economic output, and more national wealth. Hooray!
But opponents of the law would counter that repealing national health insurance would not create two million new job openings. Rather, it would force (the equivalent of) two million workers to go to work, or to work longer hours, in order to get health insurance. The way this plan would work is that millions of workers who are able to afford health insurance outside of getting it through their job would lose it…. Suddenly desperate and at risk of losing access to medical care for themselves or their families, they would find options like working part-time or staying home to raise their children or running their own business to be impossibly expensive or risky. They would flock to any job they could get that came with insurance as a benefit. The influx of new workers, without any corresponding increase in demand for labor, would decrease wages….
In our hypothetical world, I don’t think the release of this reverse-CBO report would be good political news for the administration proposing to repeal national health insurance. I think it would be a political disaster. Reporters would flock to tell the stories of victims like John, the engineer who saved enough to retire at 59 years old, but has a heart condition and is losing access to individual insurance and has to find a job with benefits until he’s eligible for Medicare, or Mary, a 27-year-old mother who can no longer raise her children at home because her husband’s small business lacks affordable insurance….
A world in which “what matters” is how a fact can be spun into attack ads is a world in which the status quo is the only safe course of political action.