Boom & Bust Monthly Insight Video: What the Media Won t Say About the ACA

Transcription

1 Boom & Bust Monthly Insight Video: What the Media Won t Say About the ACA Hi, I m Rodney Johnson, co-editor of Boom & Bust and Survive & Prosper. Welcome to the February 2014 educational video. February 2014 This month, we re going to talk about the Affordable Care Act. Don t worry; we re not getting into any of the politics of it. What we want to talk about is something very specific that was recently reported, which is that the Affordable Care Act will cost the economy 2.3 million to 2.5 million jobs. Now, that s a big number and a big claim. But it s not exactly how it sounded. Yes, this was a report and yes, it s what the media put out there. But where the number came from and what the number actually means is very important. 1 P a g e

2 It came from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). And this group has the very unenviable task of taking legislation and trying to figure out what it s going to do in the economy. They ve got to put a number. They ve got to put a real number of cost to everything that comes through, in terms of legislation. And so, what they said was: Yes, we will have a reduction that equates to this employment, but not exactly how the media put it. When the CBO came out and announced this, they said that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked in the economy by 1½ percent to 2 percent. Okay. 2 P a g e

3 And they said that it would mostly be because labor chooses to supply less. Hmm. 3 P a g e

4 Now, they went on to say this reduction in hours would be the equivalent of losing 2 million jobs up to 2017, up to maybe 2.5 million jobs in And so that s where that number came from. But it s very interesting how they phased it and what it means. This whole idea of people willingly choosing to supply less labor means that people are choosing not to work. They re either choosing to work fewer hours or just out and out quit. Now how could the Affordable Care Act make you want to quit your job? Doesn t seem logical. Well, they had two main reasons: The first one is people are actually gaining access to affordable health insurance in the individual market. And think of it, if you could retire but you needed healthcare or health insurance and you weren t offered health insurance at all, what would you do? 4 P a g e

5 Well, you might go find a job just for the health insurance. This happens more often than we might think. People with chronic conditions it s not that they couldn t find afford health insurance; it s that it wasn t offered at all. Now, of course, many people were offered individual health insurance policies that were astronomically expensive. And so both of those groups will look at this and say: Hey, I don t really need to work. I was just doing it so I had some health coverage. And now they don t have that burden anymore. So they could be choosing to quit. 5 P a g e

6 The second is people who choose to work fewer hours or to limit their growth because they want to qualify for a subsidy. This is just a piece of math, and it s a weird piece of math that comes out of the law. But, just as an example these aren t the numbers say you re making $20,000 a year at a part-time job. If your job pushes you up to say $22,000 or $24,000, if you lose a health insurance subsidy of $200 to $300 a month, well, that s $2,500, $3,500 a year. And so it s a piece of math to determine, is it worth it to earn more and if it takes away a large chunk of subsidy, probably not. And so, those are the two ways that we re looking at potentially the ACA or Affordable Care Act limiting or dropping employment. Now this all feeds back into a reduction in labor force participation people willingly choosing not to be employed or not look for a job; being unemployed. And that has some broader implications for the economy, not all negative. 6 P a g e

7 On the positive side, it could free up some positions for people who want work. It could actually lower the amount of unemployment, because if I m just in the labor force because I need health insurance and now I ve got it on the individual market and I can afford it, well, I quit my job and somebody else gets it. That s not all bad. 7 P a g e

8 The second is choice. We all want choice. And if I m not locked into doing something just for health insurance, I get to choose more of my own destiny. That s a pretty good thing. But it does have some downside. People choosing to limit their employment just to qualify for a bigger government subsidy, that s a weird one, right? We don t want that. That s not how we want laws to be set up. You would think it would be more graduated, so as you work, maybe you lost a portion of your subsidy, but it never would offset in a big cliff, so that you would say: No, no, don t pay me anymore because I need to keep the subsidy. That s just weird. The second one is, as people leave the workforce they re paying less in taxes. Now, of course, less income tax, but also less FICA or Social Security and Medicare tax. And a lot of these people could be at the level where they re retiring, but not yet qualifying for Medicare. And so they may be pulling Social Security benefits and getting individual health insurance before Medicare. So they actually flip from adding to the Social Security coffers by paying in to receiving out. This is the big trend we need to be watching for. It s going to happen anyway with baby boomers, but we re kind of speeding it up here. And so we re looking at a situation, which we all know, but this is one more big instance of it, where we turn from a nation of paying into these programs to pulling more out of it. And that s going to cost in the long run. And a cost in the long run always means the same thing: bigger taxes. [End of Audio] 8 P a g e