{"id":353725,"date":"2010-02-23T08:55:35","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T13:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.36408"},"modified":"2010-02-23T10:08:31","modified_gmt":"2010-02-23T15:08:31","slug":"health-care-reform-is-not-a-jobs-stimulus-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/353725","title":{"rendered":"Health Care Reform Is Not a Jobs Stimulus Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/span>President Obama plugged a $950 billion health care reform plan yesterday in advance of Thursday’s health care summit with Republicans. Marc Ambinder has the rundown<\/a>. There are plenty of good reasons to be critical of the health care plan: you can say it doesn’t do enough to dramatically reform a broken system; or it doesn’t do enough to ease the government’s entitlement commitment over the next generation; or perhaps that it doesn’t spend enough to reduce the burden of exponentially inflating health care premiums. Those sound like reasonable critiques that I’d anticipated discussing today.<\/p>\n

One not-terribly-reasonable critique of Obama’s new health care reform plan that I did not anticipate discussing today is that it “loses” its “jobs component.” Health care reform lost a jobs component? Health care reform had<\/i> a jobs component? I’m confused.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

MSNBC’s John Schoen writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

When President Barack Obama was pushing his plans for health care<\/nobr><\/a> reform last summer and fall, he said change was needed to put the nation’s economy on a firmer footing.<\/p>\n

But with his new
\ncompromise proposal Monday aimed at forcing a congressional vote on the
\nissue, Obama appears to be making a pure political gambit with little
\nexplicit reference to the economic struggles still afflicting millions
\nof jobless workers.<\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n

… Obama no longer
\ncan argue that the health care proposal will create jobs<\/b> or at least
\nremove an impediment to job creation, some analysts said. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I
\ndon’t know exactly what I’m supposed to make of this. When was health
\ncare reform ever plugged as a job stimulus bill? A respectable job
\nstimulus bill would go into effect immediately. Most of the major
\nprovisions from health care reform don’t kick for another four years<\/a>.<\/i> <\/p>\n

Maybe Schoen is trying to say he’d like Obama to drop health care to focus on job growth (even as a jobs bill is working its way<\/a> through the Hill’s digestive tract). Now, it’s
\nreasonable to say the president should have passed a larger, or more
\ntargeted, stimulus before going on to enact his campaign agenda. It’s
\nalso reasonable to ask whether a second, distinct jobs bill might pull
\ndown unemployment faster. But it is not reasonable to say Obama should have
\nsuspended his campaign agenda indefinitely in January 2009 and put a
\nhold on all reforms — in health care, and financial regulation, and
\ncarbon emissions, and immigration — unless<\/i> they have an immediate and tangible impact on job creation. Beneath the rubble of the recession is a country with all of its old flaws and imperfections, and they need our attention, too.
\n______<\/p>\n

On a separate, slightly related note, health care inflation over the last decade has corresponded with remarkable job growth in the health care industry<\/i>, as one of my favorite jobs graphs ever does a good job of showing. The Council of Economic Advisers predicts<\/a>
\nthat in the next decade, four million jobs will be created in the
\nhealth care industry — more than in any other industry, and twice the
\njobs created in education and financial services combined<\/i>. It’s
\nreasonable to argue that an economy overly reliant on health service
\njobs is undesirable, that it bleeds employers and employees of income,
\nand crowds out investments in other sectors. But one natural result of
\nhealth care taking over 17 percent of the economy and growing fast is
\nthat it happens to create quite a lot of work.
\n\"Thumbnail<\/a>


\n

\n Email this Article<\/a>
\n Add to digg<\/a>
\n Add to Reddit<\/a>
\n Add to Twitter<\/a>
\n Add to del.icio.us<\/a>
\n Add to StumbleUpon<\/a>
\n Add to Facebook<\/a>
\n

\n\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Obama plugged a $950 billion health care reform plan yesterday in advance of Thursday’s health care summit with Republicans. Marc Ambinder has the rundown. There are plenty of good reasons to be critical of the health care plan: you can say it doesn’t do enough to dramatically reform a broken system; or it doesn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}