Block wrote: I mean if one person gets a new job and 4 people get insurance as a result, that person, spouse, two kids, it has an effect on the numbers. And for a sciency board I'd think that'd be obvious.
The issue with this mechanism is that you'd still expect a more or less fixed ratio between the percentage of people who are unemployed and the percentage of people with no insurance.
There are 156 million Americans in the labor force according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics.
There are 319 million Americans. There are roughly 64 million Americans who are on Social Security which is a rough metric of how many
non-dependent people there are that are out of the workforce due to age or disability. Some of those may still be someone's dependent for health insurance purposes, such as disabled spouses, so knock that down to 50 million.
In which case there are 156 million eligible American workers, who are in the position to provide work-based health insurance both for themselves, and for (319-50-156 equals) 107 million dependents, 74 million of whom are children.
Eyeballing it, then, we can assume that for every person who gets a job, roughly 1.6 people will get health insurance. You might nudge that a bit, and say it's 1.7 or 1.5. But it's highly unlikely to be as high as, oh,
two. Let alone three...
Unless of course there is some force that makes people with lots of dependents disproportionately likely to get new jobs. But if there was such a force, it would already be in play, and the people with the most dependents would
already have jobs, since 90% or more of the workforce does. In that case, the 1.6 figure would likely be an overestimate because on average, unemployed people would have LESS than 0.6 dependents eligible for coverage on the plan of a prospective employer.
Moreover, it is obvious that not everyone who gets a job gets health insurance.
Therefore, I think we can reasonably assume that the ratio of roughly 1.6 Americans getting health insurance per person who joins the workforce is a fair estimate. It seems unlikely to be much higher than that, in any case.
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Anyway. Let's look at the consequences of that.
Employment is measured in terms of how many of those 156 million working-age, able-bodied, seeking-work Americans have jobs. At the moment U6, the percentage of the population that is seriously underemployed or not employed, is about 11%. Prior to the rise of Obamacare, the percentage of uninsured Americans was about 19%.
Thing is, the US population is
twice the size of the labor force. If we gave a job to every American in the labor force, including able-bodied people who have given up the job search but would still work if they thought they could... and if the ratio of 1.6 people getting insurance per person who gets a job holds...
We would STILL have some people left over uninsured. In which case it is highly unlikely that the rapid change in the uninsured rate can be entirely explained, or even mostly explained, by changes in employment.
