Even before it was enacted, it was obvious that Obamacare was going to have a negative economic impact.
- From a fiscal policy perspective, the law was bad news because all the new spending and higher taxes increased the fiscal burden of government.
- From a regulatory intervention perspective, the law was bad news because it exacerbated the third-party payer problem.
- Form a jobs perspective, the law was bad news because it increased the attractiveness of government dependency compared to employment.
But those were just the slap-you-in-the-face impossible-to-overlook problems.
As Nancy Pelosi infamously noted, the law needed to pass so we could know what was in it.
And the more we learn about the contents, the more evidence we find that (as shown in this poster) that more government is never the answer.
A new empirical study by scholars at Harvard and Stanford finds that “free” goodies from the government actually have a hefty price tag.
The dependent care mandate…one of the most popular provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act…requires that employer-based insurance plans cover health care expenditures for workers with children 26 years old or younger. …there has been little scholarly work measuring the costs and incidence of this mandate and who pays the costs of it. In our empirical work, ….we find that workers at firms with employer-based coverage – whether or not they have dependent children – experience an annual reduction in wages of approximately $1,200. Our results imply that the marginal costs of mandated employer-based coverage expansions are not entirely borne only by the people whose coverage is expanded by the mandate.
Source: More Perverse (but Predictable) Economic Consequences of Obamacare | International Liberty
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