Obamacare Conclude Overhaul Will Reduce Labor Force by Almost 800,000 Jobs
Drs. Coburn and Barrasso releases new health care report, and the consequences of “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” worse than anticipated. One section reports on the impact this new law has on jobs. Full report available here.
Before the health care legislation became law, proponents of the overhaul claimed that health reform would create jobs. At the White House health care summit in February, the Speaker of the House of Representatives asserted the federal health care overhaul would create “400,000 jobs almost immediately,” both in the health care industry and “in the entrepreneurial world as well.”[1] However, recent independent reviews have contradicted such rosy scenarios and found the legislation will wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs.[2]
Nonpartisan Experts Conclude Health Overhaul Reduces Labor Force By 788,000 Jobs
The CBO’s analysis did not even take into account the overhaul’s job impact on specific industries. Unfortunately, the lost jobs count can be expected to climb even higher because of a simple provision tucked into the legislation. Section 6001 of the health overhaul prohibits hospitals owned by physicians from expanding and denied Medicare reimbursements to any physician-owned hospitals not certified by Medicare by the end of the year.
According to a Washington Times report, “the Physician Hospitals of America (PHA) identified 39 projects under development whose owners had canceled outright, knowing they could not win Medicare certification by the end-of-year deadline, plus another 45 that will be hard-pressed to meet Medicare certification criteria in time.”[9] Sadly, according to PHA conversations with its member hospitals, the canceled projects could have created “roughly 25,000 jobs.”[10] As the Times article notes, the “job-killing provisions” of the overhaul are “particularly ironic given that physician-owned facilities tend to be economically efficient and deliver superior medical outcomes.”[11]
Ironically, while the new law has made it illegal for physicians to have further ownership in a hospital, the law has the effect of increasing a hospital system’s “ownership” of an individual physician.
A former policy advisor at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) described the approach of the law as envisioning “that doctors will fold their private offices to become salaried hospital employees, making it easier for the federal government to regulate them and centrally manage the costly medical services they prescribe.”[13]
This is bad bad news. Your medical care will be regulated by the Federal Government and like in Canada you won’t be able to get to a private doctor unless you fly to another country.
Government RICO 