Will Obamacare Cause Mass Unemployment?

It turns out that there was a CBO study that concluded that about 800,000 Americans are only working because being on a group plan is the only way for them to afford health insurance. When Obamacare  makes it feasible for them to get insurance on the individual market, they are going to retire.  That is a huge change.  Rep. Michele Bachmann said that Obamacare "will kill" the jobs, but by this measure, Social Security and Medicare are the biggest job killing programs in US history for enabling mass retirements.

These retirements won’t increase unemployment because the definition of unemployed are people who are looking for work and these people do not want to work.  It should decrease unemployment because the unemployed will be able to fill these jobs.  It will swap some employed people who don’t want to work for unemployed people who do want to work. This is not falling into the lump-of-labor fallacy because people who want to retire have a lot more savings than unemployed people and so the spending of the newly retired will decrease less than the spending of the newly employed will increase and that will boost aggregate demand.

A Medicare-for-all plan really would kill jobs because it would dramatically reduce administrative costs.  It would eliminate private insurance company jobs and many jobs of people who work in billing departments.  This is what increased efficiency usually does.  Look what happened to farmer employment as they got more efficient.  If farmers could still only feed a little more than their family, then we would still all be farmers. 

Too bad the CBO didn't also estimate how many entrepreneurs are only working a corporate job for the health insurance and will start small businesses once they can afford an individual plan.