With the release of today's jobs report for March 2014, we now have
official data showing four full years of private-sector job growth under Obamacare. Since the President signed the law, a total of 8.8 million jobs have been created in the private sector, a dramatic turnaround from the loss of 3.6 million private-sector jobs in the decade before Obamacare.
Today's report is an important reminder of what's at stake in Washington, where every vote to repeal health reform is a vote to return to the type of job-killing policies that prevailed when businesses shed millions of jobs in the decade before Obamacare. The choice for congressional Republicans is clear: They can join with Democrats to strengthen America's comeback by investing in more policies like the Affordable Care Act that provide economic security and opportunity to hard working Americans and small businesses, or they can try to stand in the way of America's comeback by refusing to do anything in Washington other than stage repeal votes for purely partisan political purposes.
A closer look at the monthly jobs numbers shows how America went from losing nearly 800,000 private-sector jobs a month at the end of the last Republican Administration to gaining jobs again within a year of President Obama signing the 2009 Recovery Act (the Stimulus). And since the President signed the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the economy has been creating an average of more than 180,000 private-sector jobs a month:
As a result of the comeback in the jobs market, the unemployment rate has dropped by more than 3 percentage points under Obamacare, from 9.9% to 6.7%:
UPDATE: The following question was asked in the comments:
[Y]ou're writing about it here as if it's been in place for four years, when for all practical purposes it was just implemented (on a practical basis) a few months ago. What's that about?
This is a good question. Here's my answer:
Many of the provisions in the law that Republicans claimed would kill jobs went into effect immediately. Indeed, just three months after the President signed the law, House Republicans put out a 43-page report slamming Obamacare that began with a section entitled, "American Jobs Already Under Attack." Likewise, the Heritage Foundation pressed the argument that the enactment of Obamacare in March 2010 had an immediate negative impact on private-sector job growth.
Now that we've created 8.8 million private-sector jobs since the enactment of the ACA, some Republicans want to argue that "Obamacare didn't go into effect until 2014," but that argument can't be reconciled with what they've been telling the American people for four years or with the fact that many of the ACA's allegedly "job killing" provisions went into effect in 2010 and 2011.
Plus, we've averaged 182,000 monthly jobs created in the private sector in the first three months of 2014, the same as the overall average over the past 4 years, so the response to the "job-killing" claim is the same whether you look at 2010-2014 or just 2014.
Of course, as the commenter notes -- and as the White House points out every month when the jobs numbers are released -- we need to do much more to strengthen the comeback. But I don't think we should be shy about pointing out the contrast between what happened in the job market under the economic policies of the last decade and what is happening in the job market under Obamacare.
In addition to the jobs comeback under Obamacare,
millions of lives have been directly impacted by the expansion of health coverage, and the law is
delivering benefits to our economy and our people that have largely gone under the radar during the political debate:
[A]verage premiums for coverage through the marketplaces are about 15 percent lower than the CBO previously projected..... The rate of increase in real health spending per person is at its lowest point in 50 years and more than 3 percentage points under the historical average ....
Just by phasing out the infamous “donut hole” created in the 2003 prescription drug law, the ACA has saved almost 8 million seniors nearly $10 billion. On top of that, real growth in Medicare spending per beneficiary has averaged virtually zero since 2010—that means lower premiums and out-of-pocket costs for our parents and grandparents. And, since the law’s passage, actuaries have extended the life of the Medicare trust fund by almost 10 years..... Since the law passed, average Medicare Advantage premiums are down by more than 9 percent, enrollment in plans has increased by 38 percent and the quality of plans has steadily gotten better.
And slowing down the growth of health care spending doesn't just benefit policyholders, it benefits the country's bottom line:
Charts archived at America's Comeback Decade.