Alleviating Fears – Health reform hasn’t, and won’t, hurt jobs!

Aug 25
08:33

2013

sammy smith

sammy smith

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Since the inception of the Affordable Care Act, there has been one reservation that has universally questioned the efficacy of the act – how badly will health reform affect the job market? The premise of this reservation lies in the employer mandate pushed by the act that requires employers to provide health insurance coverage to employees, no matter how miniscule their operation is.

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This has led experts to predict that enforcement of these mandates would lead to reduction in working hours and available jobs across industries. Fortunately,Alleviating Fears – Health reform hasn’t, and won’t, hurt jobs! Articles this prediction hasn’t come true, and research shows that industries are actually demonstrating an increase in available jobs.

The research picks up the restaurant industry as the prime example here, particularly because experts have always targeted it as an industry which would reduce hours on job and number of jobs to tackle additional costs related to health coverage for employees. According to available facts, restaurants have experienced a rapid growth among all other industries, and their sales have surpassed predicted targets. A logical contention by federal authorities points out that if the Affordable Care Act were hurting jobs, it would have affected slower job growth in industries where employees were not covered by employer provided coverage by default.

From the research and results above, it is evident that the efforts made by the health reform authorities are not wasted. However, authorities are consciously working to ensure that their accomplishments are not chained by the strings of complacency. A recent postponement of the employer mandate is one such example. According to the employer mandate, companies with more than 50 fulltime employees had to provide health coverage in alignment with Obamacare by January 1, 2014.

Sensing the presence of several loopholes and negative intentions, such as reducing fulltime work hours to escape the mandate, the authorities have thought it better to delay the mandate by 1 year. Although the repercussions of this abrupt move would be widespread, government feels it to be the best choice at the moment. 

In a nutshell, government is striving hard to make believe that the Affordable Care Act is taking US healthcare in the right direction. Healthcare cost growth this year has been the lowest in the last 50 years, with expenditure on healthcare goods and services being only 1.1%. The rate of hospital readmissions have fallen to 17.8% from 19 percent in 2010. All these facts are supporting the government’s efforts in this direction, and it seems likely that the health reform won’t hurt the job industry in future as well.