Ken Jacobs: Subpar reporting by Vanessa Wong of Bloomberg on ObamaCare: Noted
Ken Jacobs: Sub par reporting on the ACA:
In a story that purports to illustrate how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will hurt fast food businesses, Venessa Wong at Bloomberg News inadvertently shows how small those impacts are likely to be…. The average shop has $800,000 a year in sales. A $4,000 annual increase on a store with $800,000 in sales is an increase of 0.5% relative to sales… 3 cents per Sandwich… I suspect that most customers won’t mind…. Health benefits have positive impacts on worker productivity and reduce absenteeism and turnover….
The article mentions the employer requirements in Hawaii and San Francisco, but unfortunately, ignores the research on both. The article even cites a brief by my colleague Dave Graham-Squire and myself, which summarizes the research on Hawaii which found no measurable impact on employment, and a small increase (1.4 percent) in part-time workers as a result of that state’s much stronger employer requirement. Research by Will Dow here at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Carrie Colla and Arindrajit Dube, likewise found no negative employment impact in the restaurant industry in San Francisco after the passage of that city’s health care policy…