“The new healthcare law will slow economic growth over the next decade, costing the nation about 2.3 million jobs and contributing to a $1 trillion increase in projected deficits, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released Tuesday. The non-partisan group’s report found that the healthcare law’s negative effects on the economy will be ‘substantially larger’ than what it had previously anticipated,” reports The Hill. “The CBO is now estimating that the law will reduce labor force compensation by 1 percent from 2017 to 2024, twice the reduction it previously had projected. This will decrease the number of full-time equivalent jobs in 2021 by 2.3 million, CBO said. It had previously estimated the decrease would be 800,000.”
(I address the White House’s attempt to spin this bad news as actually being good news at this link, because that spin is being parroted by left-wing blogs like Daily Kos, and by the New York Times editorial board — although not by the New York Times news staff, many of whom, despite their liberalism, are apparently privately embarrassed by the shrillness and “reflexively” left-wing ideology of its editorial board).
Originally, the Congressional Budget Office had wrongly concluded that Obamacare would reduce the deficit. It reached that incorrect conclusion by allowing supporters of Obamacare to hide its costs through accounting gimmicks and dodges. But in 2010, after Obamacare passed, it began increasing its cost projections for Obamacare, and also admitted “that Obamacare includes work disincentives likely to shrink” the economy.
Obamacare contains massive marriage penalties that discriminate against married people, and huge work disincentives for some older workers. It has slashed hiring, cut economic growth, and induced employers to replace full-time workers with part-time employees, driving even unions that once backed it to seek its repeal or replacement. Obamacare’s medical device tax has caused layoffs by medical manufacturers.
Due to Obamacare, millions of health insurance policies have been canceled, or replaced by policies with higher premiums and deductibles. In November, the president announced a supposed “fix” that was illegal, didn’t restore the canceled policies, and was designed to scapegoat insurers rather than restore lost health insurance. In December, the president announced another “fix” that made things even worse, by illegally violating property and contractual rights, in a way that may drive up insurance premiums in the future. The administration’s illegal 2013 suspension of reporting requirements mandated by the healthcare law may lead to billions of dollars in fraud.
