July 20, 2011
It’s a simple fact: healthy economic recovery depends on job creation. The challenge is empowering businesses to create those new jobs while they shoulder an increasing burden of health insurance regulation.
The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk explains that economic recovery stalled after Obamacare was passed:
The economy is experiencing an unusually slow recovery. While the labor market improved steadily from January 2009 to April 2010, it suddenly stalled in May. This coincided with the passage of President Obama’s health care overhaul, which significantly raised both the costs and uncertainty involved for businesses providing employer-sponsored health insurance.
There are several reasons why Obamacare prevents businesses from expanding. Sherk breaks these down into three practical points:
- Businesses with fewer than 50 workers have a strong incentive to stay small in order to avoid the mandate to provide government-approved health coverage or face a penalty;
- Businesses with more than 50 workers will see their costs for health coverage rise—they must purchase more expensive government-approved insurance or pay a penalty; and
- Employers face considerable uncertainty about what constitutes qualifying health coverage and what it will cost. They also do not know what the health care market or their health care costs will look like in four years. This makes planning for the future difficult.
So what’s the bottom line? Economic growth—and job growth—depends on business growth, and Obamacare places a burden on businesses which holds them back from the risk of expansion.
For the latest on repealing Obamacare, see a full list of Heritage research on the topic. For Heritage’s principled alternative, check out our plan for health care at Saving the American Dream.
Jon - July 20, 2011
“There are two kinds of propaganda — rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody’s enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion. Where the actions of individuals are concerned there are motives more exalted than enlightened self-interest, but where collective action has to be taken in the fields of politics and economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of effective motives. If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country’s long-range self-interest, this world would be an earthly paradise. As it is, they often act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least creditable passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery. Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.” – Brave New World Revisited, by Aldous Huxley