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This week the Affordable Care Act turns 12 and Bloomberg has a piece reflecting on how the economies of states that leaned into its implementation have fared relative to those that preferred to try and obstruct it. Provocative, given the hysterical predictions made by opponents back during the early Obama years.
Obamacare Is Boosting Economic Health
Granted, the 12 states still holding out on Medicaid expansion (largely the remnants of the Old Confederacy) tend to be the ones that lag on metrics of pretty much anything one might wish to measure about a state, so there's that. Of course that also means they'd disproportionately benefit from dropping their pointless, vestigial anti-Obamacare gestures and working to improve their health care systems.
Obamacare Is Boosting Economic Health
A decade’s worth of data has now rendered a partial verdict: States that have fully embraced the Affordable Care Act are enjoying healthier labor markets and stronger income growth than those that haven’t.
Standard measures of jobs and personal income growth show that even Texas — the biggest of the states still rejecting the Medicaid expansion — trails the states that joined it after turning it down when it became available on Jan. 1, 2014, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The Medicaid expansion, enabling more than 4 million of the most vulnerable people to work, turned out to be a catalyst for growth. That may explain why 38 states and the District of Columbia have embraced the insurance extension, up from 25 when it first became available on Jan. 1, 2014.
By 2020, before the coronavirus pandemic ended the longest period of U.S. growth in modern times, the job market in states initially refusing and subsequently implementing the Medicaid expansion outperformed states opposed to it, according to labor participation data compiled by Bloomberg. Labor participation measures the proportion of people in the working-age population who have jobs or are seeking work. Excluding recent transplants during the pandemic, the trend continues unabated because the Covid-19 pandemic weighed heavily on mothers without child care, especially low-wage women, whose recent employment significantly lags behind men.
Granted, the 12 states still holding out on Medicaid expansion (largely the remnants of the Old Confederacy) tend to be the ones that lag on metrics of pretty much anything one might wish to measure about a state, so there's that. Of course that also means they'd disproportionately benefit from dropping their pointless, vestigial anti-Obamacare gestures and working to improve their health care systems.