Despite warnings, Obamacare hasn’t hurt job market
The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is not having a negative impact on the American job market, two economists argue in a new working paper.
As the debate over the law boiled over in Washington, DC this summer, the working paper threw cold water on a claim made by several of the law’s critics: that it was killing American jobs.
That argument was founded on early projections made by the Congressional Budget Office. But the working paper written by Gopi Shah Goda, Mark Duggan, and graduate student Emilie Jackson shows that these predictions were inaccurate—the ACA has actually had little aggregate impact on the labor market.
Recently, the so-called “skinny bill” to repeal the ACA met defeat in the Senate, leaving the ACA intact.
Below, Duggan, a professor of economics as well as the director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and Goda, a senior fellow at SIEPR and the institute’s deputy director, answer questions about their research, the ACA’s impact on the workforce, and their expectations of what’s to come.
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