Congressional Republicans are operating on the assumption that Obamacare is obviously bad, terribly unpopular and that their determination to destroy it will carry them to victory in November. And that may be true. Believing that at this point, however, assumes facts not in evidence.
On Friday, President Obama vetoed a bill that would have repealed most of the Affordable Care Act and cut federal funding for Planned Parenthood. It was only the eighth veto of his presidency. It was also entirely predictable. Everyone knew Obama was not about to sign into law a bill undoing his signature accomplishment.
Republicans nonetheless called it a win. Although they have voted more than 50 times to repeal Obamacare this was the first such bill to reach the president’s desk. It passed the Senate using a parliamentary maneuver that prevented Democrats from filibustering, which meant it could pass with a simple majority. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said, “It clears the path to repealing this law with a Republican president in 2017.”
All that came about amid a tumultuous week that saw Wall Street experience its worst five-day opening on record. The Dow and the S&P 500 both ended the week down more than 6 percent. For the S&P that translates to a loss of more than $1 trillion.
That was all blamed on events in China, with most commentary over the weekend holding that the U.S. economy is strong. That hopeful tone was bolstered by a Labor Department jobs report released Friday that said the U.S. economy added 2.65 million jobs in 2015. As The New York Times reported Friday, employers hired 292,000 more people in December alone. With October and November figures revised up, the U.S. gained an average of 284,000 jobs per month for the last three months.
At 5 percent, the unemployment rate is half what it was in October 2009. That makes the last two years the best for job growth since the 1990s.
There are issues, of course. Wage gains have too often been concentrated at the top and median family income has actually fallen. Pressure to raise wages still seems to be seen as something that will occur eventually.
But the economy keeps adding jobs in impressive numbers. As Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics told the Times, “The remarkable thing is how consistent employment growth has been over the past three or four years. That’s quite an achievement.”
How can that be? The president’s critics have said all along that Obamacare would be a job killer. Might they have gotten that wrong? And if so, what does that say about their political calculations?
The Washington Post reported on three studies released last week that suggest that, at least so far, Obamacare has had little effect on employment. The studies – two published in the journal Health Affairs and a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research – found individual examples of the kind of problems critics had predicted. But as one economist said, “They’re just not generalizable. It’s not what is mostly happening.” Another economist told the Post that trying to find the effect of Obamacare on the job market is like “finding a needle in a haystack.”
The GOP might worry that its effect on the election could prove equally elusive.
