In Search of Unspun News

The Congressional Budget Office, which partisans observe as either a neutral, omniscient force of total knowledge or a coven of innumerate hacks depending on how it scores one’s preferred policies, released a report yesterday on the effects of the Affordable Care Act. The number making all the news was that the labor force could shrink by the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time workers over the next decade.

Republicans and conservative writers, who’ve attacked the CBO as a closet-liberal enemy during the health care saga over the past few years for consistently estimating that the ACA will reduce deficits, were quick to interpret that analysis in the manner best serving their purposes: Obamacare will kill two-plus million jobs. It will kill them. Obamacare will take the hammer and sickle and smash up those precious, innocent jobs to blood and guts, cackling all the way.

But surprise surprise, that’s not what the report said. The reduction it spoke of would come from the supply of labor — not from employers eliminating full-time positions. Now that access to health care has been expanded through Medicaid and subsidized, individual-market health insurance, some workers who were only working the hours that they did in order keep their health insurance may opt to work less. The CBO, knowing how its words can be twisted, was explicit in making this distinction:

The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).

This was misreported by plenty of people who once again should have known better, but rarely do. And then there was the concurrent meta-analysis from the savvies at places like Politico, which noted that while the report may not have said that 2.5 million jobs would be killed, this is fantastic news for Republicans, who’ll be able to lie about it and not be held accountable by the ineffectual political media:

There’s a lot more fine print about what those numbers really mean, and whether the jobs were “lost.” In fact, CBO said it’s in large part about the number of hours people choose to work, not actual job losses.

But what matters politically is how the numbers look in attack ads. And in this election year, “2 million lost jobs” is a Republican ad-maker’s dream.

And sure, chances are they’ll go with “Obamacare kills millions of jobs.” They shouldn’t feel the need to, though, because there’s a classic, perfectly legitimate left-versus-right debate to be had within pre-spin CBO report. Republicans can argue, accurately, that the ACA provides a (very modest) disincentive for some to work, which could be a lag on GDP growth. Democrats can argue, accurately, that the ACA liberates people to do whatever they want by providing security over health care.

And yes, “do whatever they want” could mean more leisure time, which is perfectly acceptable. The White House and affiliated outlets are embarrassed to say this, though, and are hedging by saying that all of these people are going to become entrepreneurs now, or they’ll be more productive workers because they’ll be healthier which will make up for the hours shortfall, blah blah blah. Maybe so! We’ll surely get some anecdotes about those cases. But if people don’t need to work as much as they once needed to in order to have access to health care, that’s a great thing. It makes for a happier society, and there’s no need to justify it as some alternative means of enhancing growth. It’s an end in and of itself.