Three Studies Confirm: Obamacare Isn’t a Job Killer

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Among the many (many, many) catastrophes predicted by opponents of Obamacare was that a lot of workers would find their hours reduced against their wishes. Why? Because Obamacare requires firms to provide health insurance only to employees who work 30 hours or more. So lots of companies would do their best to reduce worker hours to 29 or less in order to avoid having to pay for health coverage.

Unlike a lot of the gloomy scenarios tossed out by Obamacare opponents, this one wasn’t entirely ridiculous. Any employer mandate is going to have a cutoff somewhere, and there really is an incentive for companies to drop as many workers as possible below that cutoff. So it’s something that can only be settled by actual research. The question is: was there an increase between 2013 and 2014 of workers just under the 30-hour threshold? Max Ehrenfreund surveys a few recent studies and says the answer is no:

Analysts at ADP studied the payrolls of the firms’ clients, about 75,000 U.S. firms and organizations. They expected that as businesses prepared for the mandate to take effect, they would adjust their employees’ schedules, limiting them to no more than 30 hours a week. Yet ADP found no overall change in employees’ weekly schedules between 2013 and last year.

According to ADP’s analysis, shifts in scheduling were trivial in every sector of the economy, even in industries that rely heavily on part-time work, such as leisure and hospitality.

….ADP’s findings were confirmed in another study by Aparna Mathur and Sita Nataraj Slavov of George Mason University and Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Their paper, published this month in the journal Applied Economics Letters, uses data from the federal Current Population Survey and finds no statistically significant change in the proportion of part-time workers in the sectors most likely to be affected by Obamacare, such as janitorial and restaurant work.

A third study confirmed these findings, and also found that eligibility for Medicaid didn’t discourage people from holding down a job (since they no longer needed a job in order to get health insurance). The study found no difference between states that expanded Medicaid and those that didn’t.

Why does it turn out that employers didn’t cut their workers’ hours? One possibility is that a year isn’t long enough for a study like this. Maybe over the next few years, as the cost of the mandate becomes clearer, companies will start getting more aggressive about cutting worker hours.

But I’d offer another possibility: the mandate didn’t have a big effect because most companies already do something like this on their own. They offer health insurance as a standard benefit only to full-time workers, and the cutoff for full-time status is usually somewhere between 25 and 35 hours. So when the mandate came along, it just didn’t change anything for most employers.

This is why two of the studies looked specifically at things like hospitality and restaurant work. These are sectors where employers (a) already maintain highly variable schedules and (b) mostly didn’t offer health insurance at all prior to Obamacare. When the mandate came along, these folks were faced with a sudden additional cost, but one that they could reduce pretty easily reduce by limiting schedules to less than 30 hours. And yet, even there the researchers found no change—or at least, no change large enough to measure.

This is not the final word, but it’s the best we have right now. Three research teams, including one not especially sympathetic to Obamacare, have all found the same thing: Obamacare isn’t a job killer. Nor is it even a schedule killer. Life goes on normally, except for the fact that millions of people now have health insurance who didn’t before.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate