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The reasons for actually ending Obamacare are getting harder and harder to find, even for Republicans. Here's one more to throw on the pile—repeal is, in the words Republicans might understand—a job-killer.
Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, studied the law and came to a very different conclusion: Repeal could actually slow down the economy, so that by 2019 the number of jobs would be almost 1.2 million lower than it would be if the law had remained in place.
That’s a big number, and depends on a bunch of assumptions (about the state of the labor force today and the actual provisions of a repeal bill, among other things) that are simultaneously debatable and defensible.
But what matters isn’t the magnitude of Obamacare’s effect on the workforce. It’s the direction―the idea that repeal could actually make it harder for people who want work to find jobs. [...]
[T]he health care law’s spending raises incomes for low- and middle-income people―what economists call “cash-constrained households.” Take away that money, and the folks who live paycheck to paycheck would have to cut back on spending quickly―by holding off on car repairs, for example, or stretching grocery dollars even farther.
Either way, it’d be less money flowing into the economy right away, and that would mean less job growth.
This is somewhat speculative, but not anywhere in the realm of alternative facts. We’ve seen, repeatedly, that the law has created healthcare jobs and that we’ve had successive months of job growth since it became law—not causation, because we were growing away out of recession, but certainly not the suppression of jobs that Republicans insisted was happening.
Bottom line, Obamacare has been an economic success story for the most part. End Obamacare, end that. Something Republicans are seeming less and less keen on making happen.