We will have to keep dinging the candidates till they get their facts right.
“The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs. What could the president be thinking by passing a bill like this, knowing full well it will kill 800,000 jobs?”
--Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.)
We hadn’t heard this yarn much since we debunked it four months ago with three Pinocchios. But here it has popped up again.
The Congressional Budget Office last August had estimated that the new health care law over the next decade would reduce the number of overall workers in the United States by one-half of one percent, which translates into 800,000 people. But that’s not the same as saying it would “kill” that many jobs.
In dry economic language, the CBO essentially said that some people who are now in the workforce because they need health insurance would decide to stop working because the health care law guaranteed they would have access to health care. (As an example, think of someone who is 63, a couple of years before retirement, who is still in a job only because he or she is waiting to get on Medicare at age 65.)
These jobs would disappear, not to be replaced, so there is an intellectually defensible argument that one could make that this is bad for the economy; others, however, might argue that this is a small price worth paying for universal health care.
But in any case the CBO did not say the health law was killing jobs.
Note also that the estimate was made five months after Obama signed the health care bill into law, so Obama did not know “full well” about it.
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