So the whole fallout from the CBO report (that is, the CBO report predicting people will drop out of the labor force due to the impacts of ObamaCare) is discouraging.<\/p>\n
To recap, there are two primary elements of people leaving the labor force or scaling back their work hours:\u00a0 the cliffs and discontinuities of ObamaCare (which I\u2019ve griped about before) and the core fact that, if you get more income, in some form, from the government, you need to earn less.\u00a0 Who does this impact?\u00a0 Not the guys living in their parents\u2019 basement, who aren\u2019t really basing their life decisions on availability of health insurance.<\/p>\n
These are the\u00a0real-life scenarios where the availability of subsidized health insurance will impact people\u2019s decisions of whether or how much to work:<\/p>\n
The biggest one, it seems to me, is people deciding whether or not they can early-retire, sitting down with their financial advisors and crunching the numbers.\u00a0 Bringing down the cost of health insurance dramatically has got to make a big difference for people in making those decisions \u2014 in the same way as age 65 is a significant marker for people pre-ACA due to Medicare.<\/p>\n
And the second group is when the secondary-earner in a couple is\u00a0the one at a job with health insurance benefits.\u00a0 A colleague of my husband\u2019s some time ago, between her comparatively low salary and the high daycare costs for her three kids, told him that she didn\u2019t actually have any net after-tax after-daycare wages, but just worked for the healthcare benefits, because her husband was self-employed.\u00a0 Whether she would have\u00a0chosen to work part-time, or not at all, if they had low-cost healthcare elsewhere, I don\u2019t know, but it seems probable that in such situations, people will make exactly this sort of decision.<\/p>\n
Will there be considerable numbers of people, who had worked overtime to be able to afford individual health insurance, scaling back?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
In any case, as Peter H. pointed out in a comment on a prior post, in a country in which the government provides universal healthcare of some sort or another, the notion of an individual working \u201cfor the health insurance benefits\u201d doesn\u2019t exist \u2014 and yet it\u2019s not as if the United States has a uniquely high labor force participation rate as a result of the work\/health insurance tie.\u00a0 He cites Canada, in particular, as having a high labor force participation rate.\u00a0 And there are many factors feeding into these sorts of differences, and I would tend to believe that this aspect is only one part of a bigger picture.\u00a0 Now, I\u2019ve said before that I support a voucher-based system for providing universal healthcare (keep it market-based but make it universal precisely to avoid the cliffs and discontinuities of means-tested systems), and I just don\u2019t believe that, especially in the long-term, switching to such a system is going to destructively pull people out of the labor force.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I raised this issue \u2014 that people making these decisions are making rational sensible decisions \u2014\u00a0as a comment on another blog, and got replies to the effect that these sorts of people are \u201ctaking advantage\u201d (meant negatively) of the system, and similar reactions are all over the frickin\u2019 blogosphere.\u00a0 People making use of subsidies are just one more instance of the \u201ctakers\u201d and the \u201c47%\u201d who just laze around being subsidized by the remainder of us who work hard.<\/p>\n