As part of the “Working Paper Series” published by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the CBO just released their latest work entitled, “How CBO Estimates the Effects of the Affordable Care Act on the Labor Market.” Essentially, the CBO projects that the labor force will be about 2 million full-time-equivalent workers smaller ten years from now, in 2025, than it would have been without the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
“The Affordable Care Act (ACA) will make the labor supply, measured as the total compensation paid to workers, 0.86 percent smaller in 2025 than it would have been in the absence of that law, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. Three-quarters of that decline will occur because of health insurance expansions, which raise effective tax rates on earnings from labor — for instance, by phasing out health insurance subsidies as people’s income rises—and thus reduce the amount of labor that workers choose to supply. The labor force is projected to be about 2 million full-time-equivalent workers smaller in 2025 under the ACA than it would have been otherwise. Those estimates were based mainly on CBO’s calculations of the effects of the law’s major components on marginal and average tax rates and on the agency’s analysis of research about the change in the labor supply resulting from a change in tax rates. For components of the law that were difficult to express in terms of changes in tax rates, CBO based its estimates on a review of the available literature about similar policy changes.”
“All told, CBO estimates that in 2025, the ACA’s reduction in the labor supply, measured as total compensation, would range from 0.4 percent to 1.3 percent. The agency’s central estimate is 0.86 percent. In other words, the effect could be about 50 percent smaller or 50 percent larger than the agency’s central estimate because of potential variations in labor supply responses to the ACA’s provisions. Accounting for potential variations in other aspects of the estimates would widen that range.”
You can read the entire paper, about 20 pages long, here.
Not to worry about the CBO’s prediction of 2 million fewer workers by 2025 due to the ACA impact. The ACA will implode on its own very soon and will never see the light of day in its present form by 2018 let alone 2025. The real question is what will the next president and congress replace it with ? Of course this is assuming the GOP captures the WH. Just about anything else would be an improvement over this monstrosity.