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from the WSJ, The Myth of ObamaCare’s Affordability by Casey Mulligan

excerpt:

The law has effects that extend well beyond the employment rate and the average length of the workweek. People, businesses and entire sectors will jockey to reduce their new tax burdens or enhance their subsidies. Their adjustments to the new incentives will make our economy less productive and stifle wage growth, even among workers who have no direct contact with the law’s penalties and subsidies.

The “29er” phenomenon is a good example of how the law harms productivity. Because ACA’s “employer mandate” requires firms with 50 or more full-time workers to offer health plans to employees who work more than 30 hours a week, many employers and employees have adopted 29-hour work schedules. This is not the most productive way to arrange the workplace, but it allows employers to avoid the mandate and its penalties and helps the employees qualify for individual assistance.

All of this, and much more, exacerbates the societal problem that the economy cannot expand its health sector without giving up something else of value. A complex law like the ACA has a few provisions that encourage work, such as counting unemployment income against eligibility for health assistance. But the bulk of the law overwhelms them. The ACA as a whole will have the nation working fewer hours, and working those hours less productively.

I estimate that the ACA’s long-term impact will include about 3% less weekly employment, 3% fewer aggregate work hours, 2% less GDP and 2% less labor income. These effects will be visible and obvious by 2017, if not before. The employment and hours estimates are based on the combined amount of the law’s new taxes and disincentives and on historical research on the aggregate effects of each dollar of taxation. The GDP and income estimates reflect lower amounts of labor as well as the law’s effects on the productivity of each hour of labor.

By the end of this decade, nearly 20 million additional Americans will have health insurance as a consequence of the law. But the ultimate economywide cost of their enrollments will be at least double what it would have been if these people had enrolled without government carrots and sticks; that is, if they had decided it was worth spending their own money on health insurance. In effect, people who aren’t receiving assistance through the ACA are paying twice for the law: once as the total economic pie gets smaller and again as they receive a smaller piece.

HKO

1. There is no such thing as a free lunch

2.  We create Rube Goldberg systems to hide costs from everyone including ourselves.

3.  It is ridiculous to assume that any central planner can manage such a large and complex market without severe economic dislocations.

4.  This plan is a disaster and anyone who supported it should be voted out of office.  Any candidate who refuses to fully repeal it is unworthy of support. Its harm is much wider and deeper than most understand.

5.  “The first rule of economics is scarcity; the first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.”

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