Obamacare is great for family values

More people with young children are taking advantage of a big perk of Obamacare—they can choose to work part-time, have health insurance, and spend more time raising their young children. Economist Dean Baker writing at Mother Jones:

[V]oluntary part-time employment […] is up by 5.7 percent in the first four months of 2015 compared to 2013. This corresponds to more than 1 million people who have chosen to work part-time. We did some analysis of who these people were and found that it was overwhelmingly a story of young parents working part-time.

There was little change or an actual decline in the percentage of workers over the age of 35 who were working part-time voluntarily. There was a modest increase in the percentage of workers under age 35, without children, working part-time voluntarily. There was a 10.2 percent increase in the share of workers under the age of 35, with 1-2 kids, working part-time. For young workers with three of more kids the increase was 15.4 percent.

Based on these findings it appears that Obamacare has allowed many young parents the opportunity to work at part-time jobs so that they could spend more time with their kids. Back in the old days we might have thought this was an outcome that family-values conservatives would have welcomed.

One of the Republican talking points about the law is that it's making this a part-time nation, with employers cutting hours to avoid having to pay for insurance. They can console themselves on being partially right on there being more part-time workers now, but they sure got the rest of it wrong.