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No Job Loss From ObamaCare

Leon County Judge John Cooper on June 30, 2022, in a screen grab from The Florida Channel.
The Florida Channel
Leon County Judge John Cooper on June 30, 2022, in a screen grab from The Florida Channel.

The Congressional Budget Office put out a forecast this week that showed the Affordable Care Act will have a positive effect on the labor market, that it will enable 2.3 million Americans to either finally retire or cut their hours. They are no longer trapped in jobs they hate in order to keep health insurance.

But as theTampa Bay Timeseditorial board notes with thinly veiled exasperation (paywall alert), Republicans were quick to spin the report as saying that "Obamacare" would "destroy 2.3 million jobs." That talking point has appeared everywhere from a tweet by House Speaker John Boehner to campaign commercials for Florida Congressional candidate David Jolly.

Meanwhile, Democrats were slow and ineffective in trying to correct the message, the Times writes, leaving the public with the impression that a good news story was actually a bad news story.

The Boehner take on the CBO report, according to PolitiFact and others, is "mostly false."

So it's a good-news story that the GOP spun into a bad-news story. PolitiFact rules the claim "mostly false." But don't expect it to disappear.

For more, see the Washington Post Fact-Checker.

Originally founded in December 2006 as an independent grassroots publication dedicated to coverage of health issues in Florida, Health News Florida was acquired by WUSF Public Media in September 2012.