Obamacare: Eroding America’s work ethic?

Polly Lower just quit her job because of Obamacare, said Sandhya -Somashekhar in WashingtonPost.com. Her boss abruptly changed her job description, giving her duties she despised. Not long ago, the 56-year-old Indiana woman would have been forced to stay on the job just to keep her medical benefits, but she discovered that under the new health-care law, she could buy a policy for her husband and herself for less than $500 a month. So she quit and became a full-time babysitter for her 5-year-old granddaughter. “It was wonderful,’’ Lower said. “It was very freeing.” Last week, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Affordable Care Act will enable legions of people like Lower to reduce their hours or leave the workforce without losing their health insurance—the equivalent of a loss of 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021. Conservatives mendaciously pounced on the figures as proof that Obamacare is a job killer, said Paul Krugman in The New York Times. But “losing your job and choosing to work less aren’t the same thing.” Unlocking millions from jobs they’d only clung onto in order to avoid medical bankruptcy will free people up to customize their time productively. They can retire early or leave the workforce to launch dream businesses or help sick relatives. Or they can go from full- to part-time jobs in order to “spend more time with their children.” What’s wrong with that?

Yes, Obamacare will give some workers greater flexibility, said Carl M. Cannon in RealClearPolitics.com. But its most pernicious effect will be on the “huge cohort of Americans” who’ll realize that, due to the health reform’s sliding scale of generous subsidies—which decrease as your income goes up, before ceasing completely—“they’d be better off financially if they cut back on their hours or quit working altogether.” Who’ll pay for their extra leisure time? “Americans who remain in the workforce, most of whom are middle class, with economic worries of their own.” Talk about perverse incentives, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Obamacare tells poor Americans “that it makes no sense to climb the income ladder,” further entrenching them in the poverty trap. “The liberal applause for this ‘liberation’ shows how radical Obamacare really is.”

There you have it, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. After trying to attack Obamacare as European-style socialized medicine, conservatives have moved on to stigmatizing it as a form of “welfare.” But it’s not the “welfare queens” of Republican imagination who get a disincentive to work under the Affordable Care Act. The law’s subsidy cutoff sits at $45,000 annually for an individual, or $94,000 for a family of four. So the people most likely to work fewer hours or quit altogether to benefit from those subsidies will be middle class, and choosing to live off their “own savings or a spouse’s income.” So why are Republicans suddenly “obsessed with the importance of coaxing every last hour of work out of the middle class”?

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

America is great because of our work ethic, said Michael -Goodwin in the New York Post. That’s why a recent line of Postal Service stamps celebrates workers, showing men and women “toiling on railroads, skyscrapers, and factory floors.” But under Obama, we have “a government that views work as a trap and celebrates those who escape it,” while placing record numbers of Americans on food stamps, disability payments, and unemployment insurance. The rise of the loafer class is Obama’s real legacy and “should be celebrated with postage stamps featuring couch potatoes dozing in front of televisions.”

At the heart of this debate lies a critical philosophical question, said Andrew Sullivan in Dish.AndrewSullivan.com. What do we truly value in life, and “what makes life meaningful”? Under the old Protestant work ethic, people were amply rewarded for devoting their lives to their jobs. But the new global economy has created stronger disincentives to be a wage slave than Obama-care ever will. While people at the very top “rake in unimaginable dough,” the salaries of the middle class and the working poor have been stagnant for decades, no matter how many hours they put in. If Obamacare frees some people to step back and pursue fuller lives after decades of fruitless striving for more material wealth, does that represent “a destruction of American values,” or a revival of them? “I suspect the latter.”