White House health care adviser Phil Schiliro maintains that Obamacare can’t be bad for jobs because some jobs have been created since it passed.
“You can’t say the Affordable Care Act has killed job growth,” Schiliro told an audience at a Kaiser Family Foundation presentation Wednesday. “In the 46 months since it passed, over 8 million jobs have been created… No one would say the Affordable Care Act created those jobs, but you can’t say the ACA has killed job growth.”
Schiliro’s comparison presumes that were Obamacare damaging at all, it would have stopped job growth entirely — including any recovery from the financial crisis in late 2008.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the financial crash and resulting recession lost the U.S. economy 8.8 million jobs.
The Congressional Budget Office issued a report concluding that the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs would be lost because Obamacare’s structure incentivizes less work with more taxpayer subsidies.
Business leaders such as the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) estimate that the Health Insurance Tax will reduce employment by up to 262,000 jobs by 2022.
The White House’s delays have tacitly admitted that some provisions could hurt businesses. The employer mandate has been delayed not once, but twice — and the politics included in the latest delay proves the Obama administration realizes its plan will cause employers to lay off workers.
The employer mandate will only begin in 2015 for businesses with 100 or more full-time employees, the Treasury Department announced. Companies with between 50 and 99 employees will be exempted from the law for another year — unless a company fires workers to make it beneath the threshold for the delay.
The IRS regulations on the delay make it very clear that only companies that shrink from 100-plus full-time workers just before the delay for “bona fide business reasons” will be exempted from the mandate to have coverage.
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