This is counterfactual, and on several levels. For starters, job-lock wasn’t a “highlight” of McCain’s 2008 campaign; it was a throwaway line. Even then, McCain—like other Republicans—never dreamed of having the government taking over health care. He floated the idea of insurance portability: allowing workers to take health insurance from one job to another.
But the CBO report isn’t really about job-lock—at least in the way the term had been used until now. The problem was previously understood to mean that barriers to obtaining health insurance were preventing Americans from moving to more attractive jobs, starting their own businesses, and, yes, even occasionally taking early retirement.
What the CBO report makes plain is that under Obamacare a huge cohort of Americans will realize they’d be better off financially if they cut back on their hours or quit working altogether so as to not jeopardize their (taxpayer-financed) health care subsidies.
Here’s the rub: Who will be paying for their health care costs? There are two possible answers; one: Americans who remain in the workforce, most of whom are middle class, with economic worries of their own; two: future generations of Americans—as we are borrowing prodigiously to pay for current spending.
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