Fox Host Falsely Claims The Affordable Care Act Prevents Job Creation
Written by Alexandrea Boguhn
Published
Fox News' Martha MacCallum falsely claimed that businesses are not hiring because of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), despite evidence that the healthcare law will actually create jobs and stimulate economic growth.
During the June 15 edition of America's Newsroom, host Martha MacCallum discussed how Hillary Clinton's support for policies designed to reduce income inequality could impact the presidential race. Citing her support for the Affordable Care Act, network contributor Katie Pavlich claimed that the health care law “do[es] nothing to pull people out of poverty.” MacCallum agreed, saying, “That is true, businesses you talk to all across the country will tell you” that they're not hiring because of Obamacare. Talking over guest Mary Anne Marsh as she replied, MacCallum demanded to know “why companies are not hiring” if not because of the Affordable Care Act:
But MacCallum's baseless assertion is just the latest effort by conservative media to fearmonger that the ACA would eliminate jobs. In 2014, media consistently misread a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, which found that the ACA would create more job opportunities by freeing Americans from job lock, claiming that it would actually eliminate positions, and going so far as to label the law a “job destroyer.”
In reality, the CBO's ten-year Budget and Economic Outlook report predicted that the health care law would create jobs while stimulating the economy:
[T]he ACA's subsidies for health insurance will both stimulate demand for health care services and allow low-income households to redirect some of the funds that they would have spent on that care toward the purchase of other goods and services--thereby increasing overall demand. That increase in overall demand while the economy remains somewhat weak will induce some employers to hire more workers or to increase the hours of current employees during that period.
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If changes in incentives lead some workers to reduce the amount of hours they want to work or to leave the labor force altogether, many unemployed workers will be available to take those jobs--so the effect on overall employment of reductions in labor supply will be greatly dampened.
As the Brookings Institute further pointed out in a March 2015 blog post, while it isn't yet possible to definitively evaluate the health care law's impact on employment, it is “not easy to make a convincing case that job gains have lagged since the President signed the health insurance law.” The post also noted that "[t]he pace of job growth has actually increased in the past few months as the Administration began to enforce the employer penalty provisions of the law."