A new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office says that the Affordable Care Act will result in more than 2 million fewer full-time workers in the next several years, providing Republican opponents of the law a powerful political weapon leading up to this year’s midterm elections.
The law is also expected to have a significant effect on hours worked, the nonpartisan budget office said in a regular update to its budget projections released Tuesday. With the expansion of insurance coverage, more workers will choose not to work and others will choose to work fewer hours than they might have otherwise, it said. The decline in hours worked will translate into a loss of the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time positions by 2024, the budget office said.
You remember the sales pitch, right?
“It will create 4 million jobs, 400,000 jobs almost immediately,” Pelosi promised.
Also remember the pledge about how Obamacare would help the government save money? DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, last year:
The Affordable Care Act, according to the CBO analysis, the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan entity, has said, has calculated it will bring the deficit down. . . . There’s a lot of garbage out there about what the Affordable Care Act does. . . . The Tea Party latched onto opposition to the Affordable Care Act with all their might, and the truth hasn’t really mattered that much, while people like me endeavor to go out, like I’m doing right now, and educate people on what it does and what it doesn’t do.
Yeah, not so much, according to that same CBO she cited:
It also creates a major issue for the president, who has repeatedly said the ACA will be revenue neutral. Instead, the CBO projects that subsidies will account for increasing chunks of deficit spending, starting at $20 billion this year and steadily increasing to $159 billion in 2024, for a collective deficit of just under $1.2 trillion. The cumulative deficit from the ACA for the next decade could reach $1.35 trillion.
UPDATE: A reader reminds me of Obama’s pledge that “health care reform will not add one dime to our deficit.”
FACT CHECK: True. Obamacare doesn’t add “one dime” to the deficit, it adds trillions and trillions of dimes.