“Obamacare is killing jobs. We know that from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.”
— Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.)
Bachmann won’t give up on this factoid, even though we debunked it seven months ago and said it was worth three Pinocchios. It’s just not correct, and remains a perfect example of how politicians twist the facts.
The Congressional Budget Office in August 2010 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 1 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 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.
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