When the Congressional Budget Office released its
latest assessment of the impact of Obamacare on the economy this week, we
discovered that nearly 2.5 million jobs will be lost because people have been “liberated”
from something called job lock. Apparently,
this is a condition afflicting many Americans who have been holding on to their
jobs for one reason and one reason only, so they wouldn’t lose their health
insurance. Now that Obamacare has broken the bond between employment and health
insurance, and provided tax-payer
subsidies to pay the premiums, millions of Americans will now be freed from
their jobs, freed to pursue their dreams, perhaps to write poetry as Nancy
Pelosi predicted many months ago.
So, job lock
enters the lexicon, defined as a horrible dream killing condition that
heartlessly requires people to work for a living. Thanks to Obamacare, we can
now tell our bosses to take a hike, secure in the knowledge that our neighbor’s
taxes will pay our health insurance premiums. This is what passes for liberation in 2013 America.
Well, I should point out that some of us have been
suffering from job lock for years,
and it has had precious little to do with health insurance. Below is a partial
list of the many factors that have had me locked to my job for 31 years now:
My wife
My mortgage
My pesky kids and their education
My desire for nice vacations
My fondness for fine dining
My selfish insistence on driving a Cadillac CTS
My pending retirement
Now, before any of you start plastering my Facebook
wall with accusations of insensitivity, let me say that I’m sure for some of
the 2.5 million people in the CBO report, Obamacare has indeed allowed them to
quit a job they may have only kept for purposes of having health insurance, and
for them that is a good and happy thing. I can and have made the argument in the
past that coupling health insurance with employment was a policy mistake made
after World War II that has hidden the true cost of coverage from ordinary
Americans and therefore distorted the market for it. But to hear every
Democratic politician greeting the news that there will be 2.5 million LESS
people working as magically transformative news has been rather disgusting.
Yes, in an era that has seen record numbers of people simply stop looking for
work and at a time when only 62% of able bodied adults are participating in the
work force, we celebrate the news of even more?
I can’t wait for the New York Times headline the
next time some big American business announces a mass layoff…Microsoft
Liberates 5,000 Job Locked Workers!
