“We should be doing all that we can to increase labor force participation. The health care law actually pushes it in the opposite direction.”
Click here to watch Sen. Barrasso’s speech.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) highlighted a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that estimates the President’s health care law will reduce the number of full-time workers by about 2.3 million people through 2021. The report also finds that the law will provide health insurance to two million fewer people this year than previous estimates expected.
Excerpts of his remarks:
“Last week, President Obama came to Congress and delivered his State of the Union address. He admitted that under the Obama economy, too many Americans are still out of work.
“Now, the President didn’t admit that his policies were to blame, but he did promise to act. He said wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand the opportunity for more American families, he said, that’s what I’m going to do.
“That’s what the President promised all of us, promised the country last week. Well I believe the President could start by coming clean about how his health care law is hurting jobs and harming middle-class Americans.
“Just this morning the Congressional Budget Office put out their estimate that the President’s health care law will reduce the number of full-time workers by 2.3 million people through the year 2021.
“Now, that includes people who will lose their jobs, people who will have their hours cut and mostly people who will just decide not to work.
“This is one of the perverse incentives in this terrible law. It actually encourages able-bodied people to not work.
“We’re already faced with the lowest labor force participation rate we’ve seen in 35 years, and this number that they’ve come out with, over two million fewer jobs in our economy, you know, when we were debating the health care law here in the Senate and the CBO came out with their estimate based on the way they read the law before it went into effect, they said, well, this could negatively impact jobs and the economy to the tune of 800,000.
“Now we’re at two and a half times that many, over two million fewer jobs—and as a result, specifically of the health care law.
“We should be doing all that we can to increase labor force participation. The health care law actually pushes it in the opposite direction.
“The Congressional Budget Office also said this morning that the health care law will provide health insurance to two million fewer people this year than previous estimates had expected.
“And one of the main reasons Democrats insisted that they needed to pass this law in the first place was to cover uninsured people. Now the Congressional Budget Office doesn’t even expect it to do the job that the Democrats intended it to do very well.
“The law is raising costs. It is hurting middle-class Americans and not even helping the people that the Democrats told us it was going to help in the first place.
“President Obama promised last week to act and to do something to create jobs. So what we see is his health care law is actually reducing jobs and reducing the number of people working.
“There are other things that the President could do to help create jobs. The first thing, though, would be to work with Republicans to repeal the health care law and come up with reforms that will actually work.”
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