The New York Post has a little fun needling clueless Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about her recent claim "there is absolutely no evidence .???.???. that there is any job loss related to the Affordable Care Act" before reporting on the latest 33,000 jobs destroyed by the Affordable Car Act:
The Advanced Medical Technology Association surveyed its members to determine the number of lost jobs since the 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices took effect in January 2013, raising about $3.8 billion a year to help pay for ObamaCare.
The survey found that nearly a third of respondents had cut research and development because of the tax, and almost 10 percent had moved manufacturing abroad.
The job losses were put at about 14,000, with another 19,000 openings that were left unfilled.
???During a time when there is bipartisan support for growing high-technology manufacturing jobs, these results should serve as a wake-up call,??? said Stephen J. Ubl, president of the Advanced Medical Technology Association.
Not if the Obama Administration's band of shameless liars and clueless dolts has anything to say about it, Mr. Ubl! Taken at her word, Kathleen Sebelius is unqualified to manage anything larger than a fast-food restaurant, since she claims to have absolutely no idea what her department is doing at any given moment - from the Healthcare.gov rollout she didn't bother to supervise, through economic damage inflicted by policies she enforces.
But of course, no one should take her at her word. These medical device tax job losses were another of the highly accurate predictions made by ObamaCare critics years ago. We all knew this was coming, and it's only a small part of the lost jobs and reduced hours inflicted by the Affordable Care Act.
For instance, you know how ObamaCare apologists are always insisting there's no evidence of anyone cutting hours to evade the ObamaCare mandates, even though numerous business executives have declared they're doing exactly that? Well, guess who absolutely has been doing it, on a massive scale, to the point where even the New York Times feels obliged to report it? The government.
Cities, counties, public schools and community colleges around the country have limited or reduced the work hours of part-time employees to avoid having to provide them with health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, state and local officials say.
The cuts to public sector employment, which has failed to rebound since the recession, could serve as a powerful political weapon for Republican critics of the health care law, who claim that it is creating a drain on the economy.
Or maybe we finally found the one thing about ObamaCare a rational person can applaud: it trims government payrolls. How about if we grant a waiver to the entire private sector and only force government employees to live under ObamaCare for a few years? That would be a great way to demonstrate its pure awesomeness and turn around all those polls that say the public hates it. They'll be clamoring to get on board once the titanic public-sector workforce has basked in Affordable Care Act glory for a while!
If you don't follow lefty websites or spend a lot of time listening to liberal pundits hold forth on TV, you might not realize how stridently they have insisted nobody is doing this. It's an article of nearly religious faith among Obama worshipers that reports of hours slashed to avoid the ACA are small-potatoes anecdotes, or even outright lies from Obama-hating (if you know what I mean and I think you do, but in case you don't: racist!) fatcat business tycoons.
But lumbering government agencies, having no idea that His Majesty would wave the royal scepter and delay mandates hither and yon in defiance of the law, went ahead and implemented the policies our liberal friends claim few in the private sector would contemplate. Once again, we see that the most ardent advocates of Big Government tend to have the most fuzzy notions of what it's actually doing:
Even after the administration said this month that it would ease coverage requirements for larger employers, public employers generally said they were keeping the restrictions on work hours because their obligation to provide health insurance, starting in 2015, would be based on hours worked by employees this year. Among those whose hours have been restricted in recent months are police dispatchers, prison guards, substitute teachers, bus drivers, athletic coaches, school custodians, cafeteria workers and part-time professors.
Mark D. Benigni, the superintendent of schools in Meriden, Conn., and a board member of the American Association of School Administrators, said in an interview that the new health care law was having ???unintended consequences for school systems across the nation.???
The Times goes on to provide various examples of these "unintended consequences," as hours and wages are cut for part-time workers at schools and municipal agencies across the land... carefully noting when the officials who made these decisions are Republicans, because at this point the Times' liberal readers are curled in a fetal position, and really need their nook-nooks.
And then the paper tucks its adorable little liberal readers in for a nap with some reassuring speculation about how the private sector might find a way around making the job cuts Big Government could not avoid:
It is not entirely clear how private employers will respond, but as some government officials point out, businesses at least have the option of passing along some of the additional costs to consumers.
In Indiana, Daniel T. Tanoos, the schools superintendent for Vigo County, which includes Terre Haute, said, ???The school system has no way to increase prices as a private business can.???
Right, right. Say, how much does private business charge per head for a quality education again, compared to what public schools cost? Well, let us not trouble our liberal friends with such thoughts right now, because they've already got so much unpleasant news churning in their tummies. Let's just cross our fingers and hope that ObamaCare costs, plus maybe the higher minimum wage and higher taxes President Obama wants, are passed along to us through higher prices and a lower standard of living, rather than higher unemployment!
