What I want to know is, where was this kind of candor from the Congressional Budget Office before ObamaCare was enacted?:
The [Una]ffordable Care Act ([U]CA) will make the labor supply, measured as the total compensation paid to workers, 0.86% smaller in 2025 than it would have been in the absence of that law, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. Three-quarters of that decline will occur because of health insurance expansions, which raise effective tax rates on earnings from labor — for instance, by phasing out health insurance subsidies as people’s income rises — and thus reduce the amount of labor that workers choose to supply. The labor force is projected to be about two million full-time-equivalent workers smaller in 2025 under the [U]CA than it would have been otherwise. Those estimates were based mainly on CBO’s calculations of the effects of the law’s major components on marginal and average tax rates and on the agency’s analysis of research about the change in the labor supply resulting from a change in tax rates. For components of the law that were difficult to express in terms of changes in tax rates, CBO based its estimates on a review of the available literature about similar policy changes. [emphasis added]
Not so much two million jobs destroyed as two million jobs never created. And if there's anything we know about the CBO, it's that they're almost certainly lowballing that figure. Small wonder that even Democrats are now coming around to the idea of repealing the murderer's row of O-Care standalone taxes like the Cadillac tax and the medical devices tax - they blitz the wallets of their special interests, Big Labor in particular. And you know the old saying about leftwingnuts being conservative when it comes to their own money.
The reaction of each side of the aisle is what we've long come to expect. Republicans once again pointed out the gapingly obvious as they have for the past almost six years....:
“When the President’s health law hurts the labor force at the same time it increases healthcare premiums and taxes, it’s clear the law is not working for the American people,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT).
“The CBO’s latest report confirms yet another broken promise and negative consequence stemming from ObamaCare.”
....while the White House wallowed in self-congratulatory delusion and outright fantasy:
The administration in the past has argued that the CBO figures also reflect new flexibility provided to workers through the healthcare law. It has also repeatedly disputed claims that the law is a “job killer” by pointing to the new jobs created with the millions of people who gained healthcare coverage.
From the month ObamaCare became law, “the private sector has added 13.7 million jobs over sixty-nine straight months, the longest streak on record,” a White House spokeswoman said.
In what quantum reality? Certainly not this one. The private sector has lost 13.7 million jobs over that time, perhaps. Mine were most definitely among them, and they've never come back. There are only so many spatulas to go around, after all. The only thing that has grown is the pool of us permanently jobless that have ceased to exist as far as the Obamaconomy is concerned, an ever-shrinking bubble of unreality in which everything is hunky-dory, his Islamocommunist policies all work, and the American people still idolatrously worship him.
The real world is dramatically different:
“In other words,” [Avik] Roy writes, “all of the disruption, spending, taxation, and premium hikes in ObamaCare has only reduced the percentage of U.S. residents without health insurance by 2.7%, from 13.9% to 11.1%: a remarkably small reduction, and far lower than what the law was supposed to achieve.” Furthermore, with enrollment vastly underperforming expectations over the first three years of the system, there will be little room for further improvement.
No reduction at all, actually. Quite the opposite. So there are, in reality, fewer people on health insurance now than before O-Care (You have to count the millions of policy cancellations from two years ago), not more.
Finally, the cost curve has indeed been bent, but upwards, and CMS chalks it up to ObamaCare. Health care spending rose 5% in 2014, well above the rate of inflation, and the fastest it had grown since 2007. Medicaid spending rose 11%, thanks to ObamaCare’s expansions, but MediCare also rose 5.5% and spending in private insurance plans rose 4.4% as well. “The return to faster growth,” CMS concluded in its report, “was largely influenced by the coverage expansions of the [Una]ffordable Care Act.”
All those old and sick people hitting their new coverages all at once. Like that's any kind of surprise. I'd wager the percentages are a lot higher simply because the Obama Regime was the source of them.
So, to tally things up, ObamaCare has accomplished none of the things we were promised it would, all of the things we warned would happen as a result of it, and of course, none of O's promises were kept, You could call it a [chuckle] "comprehensive" failure if there was any reason to believe that this boondoggle wasn't deliberately inflicted upon We the People.
As such, it has been a tremendous success.
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