Obamacare With a Public Option: Fool Me Twice Shame on Me

By Thomas Palley

There is an old saying “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.” That saying is relevant for the current healthcare debate in which former Vice-President Biden and elite Democrats are touting a reheated version of Obamacare with a public option. It is a case of trying to fool the American public twice.

Adding an Obamacare public option will not solve the healthcare problem. Worse yet, it misses an historic opportunity to heal the festering wound of healthcare via a single-payer system as proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders.

Read rest here.

Fraternity of Failure: The Alternative Version

By Thomas I. Palley

Hillary Clinton does not want to talk about past economic controversies. And it is easy to understand why. There is much that is troubling. But let’s not go along with her wishes. You can learn a lot by studying recent history and even more by watching how politicians react to that history.

The big “let’s move on” story of the Clinton campaign is the refusal to answer journalists. According to the Washington Post in the first 29 days after she announced her campaign she took just eight questions. The campaign’s response to all this? Blah. Reporters whining as usual.

Now, I’m not going to be impolite and focus on questions about the Iraq War which have been getting Jeb Bush in deep trouble with some liberals. Instead, I’m going to focus on economic policy which is my area of expertise. It also seems to be the focus of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.

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Gerald Friedman: The ACA and America’s Health-Care Mess

By Gerald Friedman

While it was enacted in 2010 without a single Republican vote, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. “Obamacare,” was built model first proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s and implemented by Republican Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts in 2006. The ACA extends the public safety net to more of the working poor but otherwise keeps the private health insurance system intact. Rather than replacing the private system—and far from the “government takeover of health care” its critics claim—it provides subsidies for individuals to buy private health insurance through state-level “exchanges.”

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More on part time jobs and Obamacare

I posted Dean's short answer to the question of whether the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, led to an increase in temporary jobs. The GOP talking point being that firms cannot afford to pay, and prefer to reduce the hours of their workers so as to not be forced to pay health benefits. Below a figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (more here, or here).

Part time jobs are declining as a share of total employment, and stand now below the peaks of other recessions like the Eisenhower and Reagan ones. Note that the definition of part time refers to those who worked 1 to 34 hours during the survey reference week for an economic reason such as slack work or unfavorable business conditions, inability to find full-time work, or seasonal declines in demand.

Dean Baker on part time jobs and Obamacare

Dean Baker on the GOP's talking point that Obamacare has led to an increase in part-time jobs, since companies cannot afford to hire them full time. As it turns out a figment of their imagination.

More here.