Is There Any Reason Not to Release the ACA Prices?
The uproar over people having their insurance plans cancelled just as the ACA “exchanges” for purchasing insurance are being set up has been amplified—probably enormously—by the failure of healthcare.gov. It is understandably anxiety-inducing to lose the insurance you have without receiving proper information on an available alternative.
Research done before the exchanges were set-up provided ample evidence that while some young, healthy, higher income people may face higher premiums (for now—but will get a better deal if they make it to the “not so young and healthy” phase of life—yah social insurance!), the vast majority of those in the individual market (and remember the uninsured!) will find better deals in the new system. So, while we have some clear evidence of that fact from states that are operating their own exchanges, people who live in states that refused to set up their own exchanges and free-rode on the federal government’s site don’t have the information yet. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a useful brief on health premiums in the federally facilitated exchanges for a set of individuals, with factors that could be used to adjust them to all family types. Unfortunately, interpreting the results are out of reach for most Americans and listing the plan features with the premiums would be far more useful. The Kaiser Family Foundation created a handy calculator, which gets closer by incorporating all ages and family types, but doesn’t provide nearly the breadth of information that could be made available.
The Jobs Gap May Be Bigger for Men, But Within Industries Men are Still Gaining More than Women
Yesterday’s Economic Snapshot showed how women’s and men’s employment prospects have fared in the Great Recession and its aftermath. Women have regained 2.9 million jobs, bringing them back to pre-recession levels, and men have gained 2.7 million jobs, still falling short 1.7 million jobs of their pre-December 2007 levels.
At first glance, it may appear that women are doing better than men. Men lost 3.4 million more jobs in the Great Recession and its aftermath than women—employment among men dropped 8.7% while women only saw a 4.0% drop in employment. By mid-2009, men had lost so many jobs that women’s payroll employment was 50% of the work force for the first time in history. In the recovery, men reversed the trend and gained more jobs than women (4.4 compared to 2.9) but, women still have a smaller jobs gap, 3.6 million compared to 4.4 million for men.
So what’s really going on here? To understand the gender dynamics of employment, it’s crucial to look at the gender breakdowns within industries. The table (an updated version of Table 5.8 from the State of Working America) below shows the distribution of male and female workers across industries and the relative change in male and female employment within their industries since 2007. The industries that have taken the biggest employment hits since 2007—construction and manufacturing, which dropped 22.3% and 12.9%, respectively—also have a disproportionately larger share of male workers than in other industries. Industries that have a larger share of female workers, such as health care and social assistance government, fared considerably better: health care and social assistance employment increased 11.5 percent since December 2007. One story of the Great Recession shows that women fared better than men, as they were disproportionately employed in industries that sustained less dramatic employment drops during Great Recession than industries that were male dominated.
House Signals Opposition to Proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership
The Obama administration has been rushing to complete a trade agreement with a dozen Pacific Rim countries including Japan, Canada, Malaysia and Vietnam, with key negotiations set to start next week in Salt Lake City. A bi-partisan group of more than 170 Democrats and Republicans sent letters to the president this week signaling their intent to oppose so-called “Fast Track” procedures (also known as Trade Promotion Authority) which would allow the White House to submit trade agreements to Congress without the opportunity to amend the deals.
Congress is wise to pause before giving the president carte blanche to negotiate new trade deals and wise to demand fuller consultation with Congress on the content of those deals. Fast track authority was first developed by the Nixon administration to rush trade agreements through Congress without threat of amendment. But deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the recently ratified Korea-U.S. trade agreement (KORUS) have failed to live up to expectations precisely because they are much more than simple trade agreements. These agreements are concerned with stimulating foreign investment and remaking a host of regulatory policies covering labor law, patents and copyrights, food safety standards, and state owned enterprises, as well as financial, healthcare, energy, telecommunications, and other service industries, as noted in a letter this week from 151 Democratic members of Congress to the president. KORUS and dozens of other trade and investment deals have resulted in a huge surge in outsourcing and have eliminated millions of jobs, especially in U.S. manufacturing.
The United States Postal Service is Waking Up
Last week, I wrote that Congress has been tying the hands of the Postal Service by limiting its ability to develop new products or to price its services competitively. Worse, Congress filled the Postal Service’s pockets with weights to drag them down financially, adding tens of billions in costs for retiree health insurance on a schedule no other corporation has to live with, while charging it more than $50 billion for pensions earned before the Postal Service was incorporated in 1971—costs that the federal government should bear, not the Postal Service.
It’s a recipe for killing the Postal Service, and postal management has sometimes seemed like a willing victim. Most notoriously, they’ve pushed to end six-day delivery of mail, even though customers love it.
But this weekend brought good news. Recognizing the strength their unparalleled, universal delivery system represents, postal management has negotiated something new: not subtracting, but adding a day of package delivery on Sunday. For now it’s limited to delivering packages for Amazon in New York and Los Angeles, but once these deliveries have been extended to the rest of the nation, who knows what other customers will decide to take advantage of this new opportunity?
I firmly believe that if the Postal Service is freed to compete more fairly, without having obstacles strewn in its path by a hostile Congress, it can rise to the challenge of maintaining universal delivery at a price that customers can afford. The Postal Service and its hundreds of thousands of employees deserve the chance.
We Have Skilled Construction Workers−They Need Jobs
The next time you read in the newspaper or hear on TV that there is a shortage of construction workers and we have to import tens of thousands of workers from abroad in order to have enough construction labor, remember this memo from Jason Furman, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers:
“Construction employment rose by 11,000 in October and is up 185,000 over the past year, but remains 1.9 million jobs below its previous peak, underscoring the importance of continued strengthening in housing markets and investments in infrastructure. Of the 185,000 increase in construction employment over the past year, the bulk (104,000) is in residential construction, while 65,000 are in non-residential construction, and 16,000 are in heavy and civil engineering construction. The gains in residential construction are consistent with the recovery we have seen unfolding in the housing sector, but additional steps still must be taken to create a more durable and fair system that promotes responsible homeownership. Moreover, the fact that employment in non-residential and heavy and civil engineering construction has grown slowly is an important reminder that we should also be looking for opportunities to invest in America’s roads, bridges, and schoolhouses.”
Indian IT Outsourcing Firm Pays Biggest Immigration Fine in History
The lengths to which businesses will go to get cheap labor are boundless. Tech firms, despite their luster, are no better in this regard than landscaping firms, hotels, or construction companies. Most tech firms want to reduce their labor costs (except for their executives), and a surprising number seem to treat the law as an obstacle to get around. I’ve written about the Justice Department’s settlement with 6 of the most famous information technology (IT) companies in America over anti-trust charges involving a conspiracy to suppress wage demands, and a subsequent lawsuit filed by the employees who would have been harmed by the conspiracy.
A newer case came into the spotlight last week. The Justice Department’s $35 million settlement of civil fraud charges against Infosys, a firm whose business model is largely based on the outsourcing and offshoring of IT work to India, facilitated by using the H-1B guestworker visa, exposed a pervasive scheme of visa abuse in the H-1B and B-1 “business visitor” visa categories. This scandal lends support to the efforts of Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to put new limits on IT outsourcing firms.
Don’t Blame the Robots for Slow Job Growth In 2000s
There is a lot of talk about robots these days, as if technological change has led to weak job creation, caused wage inequality, and even caused the profit share of the economy to increase as workers’ share (compensation) falls. We have definitely had problems with employment growth and growing wage inequality, alongside a profit boom not just during the Great Recession and its aftermath but since 2000—and for wage inequality, for two decades prior. Is technology driving all this? I think not.
This post tackles the issue of whether robots slowed job growth in the 2000s (my colleague Josh Bivens has addressed this previously, but for the recovery). In the near future I will be addressing whether robots are responsible for our current wage inequality. Spoiler alert: they aren’t.
MIT professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson wrote the influential book Race Against The Machine, which has driven much of this conversation. They label the disconnect between employment growth and productivity growth in the 2000s the “Great Decoupling.” Moreover, they argue that there has been an “acceleration of technology” that has “hurt wages and jobs for millions of people” even as “digital progress grows the overall economic pie.” Brynjolfsson and McAfee know a lot more about technology and its impact on firms and work than I do, but attributing the job slowdown in the 2000s to robots or digitalization overlooks a simple alternative answer: slow aggregate output growth caused by the bursting of asset bubbles. In fact, they do not offer much evidence to connect the technological trends (robots and digitalization) they document to the aggregate job, wage and inequality trends they, and I, care about.
Health Insurance Exchanges Will Go a Long Way Toward Fixing the Broken Health Care System
The non-elderly population across the country relies on employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) as their primary form of health coverage. In eleven of the last twelve years, however, ESI coverage has declined. Across the country, on average, ESI coverage for the under-65 population fell 10.8 percentage points from 2000 to 2012. Translated into raw numbers, if the ESI coverage rate had not declined over this period, 29 million more Americans would be covered today by their employers. Twenty-two states experienced losses in excess of 10 percentage points over the period. The largest declines in coverage occurred in Nevada, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Indiana, each with losses of at least 13 percentage points.
As a result of these losses, the average coverage rate in 2012 was down to 58.4 percent. The map below compares ESI coverage for the entire under-65 population across states in 2011/2012.1 Massachusetts has the highest rate of ESI coverage at 70.8 percent. It is followed by New Hampshire (70.0 percent), Connecticut (69.7 percent), Minnesota (69.0 percent), North Dakota (67.6 percent), and Maryland (67.3 percent). In contrast, less than half of New Mexico’s non-elderly population has ESI, at 47.2 percent.
Employer-sponsored health insurance coverage by state, population under 65 years old, 2011–2012
| State | ESI Coverage |
|---|---|
| Alabama | 57.9% |
| Alaska | 57.0% |
| Arizona | 54.8% |
| Arkansas | 50.1% |
| California | 52.6% |
| Colorado | 61.4% |
| Connecticut | 69.7% |
| Delaware | 64.4% |
| District of Columbia | 57.6% |
| Florida | 51.8% |
| Georgia | 54.5% |
| Hawaii | 65.9% |
| Idaho | 56.7% |
| Illinois | 60.8% |
| Indiana | 63.0% |
| Iowa | 64.5% |
| Kansas | 59.9% |
| Kentucky | 57.5% |
| Louisiana | 53.0% |
| Maine | 60.9% |
| Maryland | 67.3% |
| Massachusetts | 70.8% |
| Michigan | 62.5% |
| Minnesota | 69.0% |
| Mississippi | 53.7% |
| Missouri | 60.6% |
| Montana | 51.5% |
| Nebraska | 63.0% |
| Nevada | 56.4% |
| New Hampshire | 70.0% |
| New Jersey | 66.0% |
| New Mexico | 47.2% |
| New York | 59.6% |
| North Carolina | 55.9% |
| North Dakota | 67.6% |
| Ohio | 61.4% |
| Oklahoma | 54.0% |
| Oregon | 57.1% |
| Pennsylvania | 64.6% |
| Rhode Island | 62.6% |
| South Carolina | 56.8% |
| South Dakota | 59.0% |
| Tennessee | 56.0% |
| Texas | 52.1% |
| Utah | 66.3% |
| Vermont | 60.9% |
| Virginia | 64.0% |
| Washington | 59.3% |
| West Virginia | 59.2% |
| Wisconsin | 64.7% |
| Wyoming | 61.1% |
Source: Author's analysis of Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement microdata
These huge losses almost surely explain the increasing demand for health reform that characterized the years leading up to the passage of the ACA, and highlight why health reform was so important. The fact is the employer-based health insurance system was fraying rapidly in the decade before health reform was implemented. Even before the ACA’s implementation, many of those losing ESI found shelter in public insurance, which disguised the precipitous drop in employer coverage. Indeed, from 2000 to 2012, public insurance, primarily in the form of Medicaid and CHIP, helped counteract the erosion in employment-based coverage and is the only reason why the uninsured rate did not rise one-for-one with the fall in ESI. However, many Americans, particularly those of working age, are still falling through the cracks. Fortunately, once the (admittedly too large) kinks are worked out, the health insurance exchanges created under the ACA will make it easier and more affordable for Americans to secure and maintain health insurance coverage, even if ESI continues the decline that has characterized the last decade.
Endnotes
1. Because of sample size requirements, I combined two years of data 2011 and 2012.
A Daily Reminder That Thousands Die In Preventable Workplace Deaths Every Year
Five days a week, I receive the Cal-OSHA Reporter News Digest, which compiles reports of deaths and injuries in California as well as other states. It’s a regular reminder that I am a lucky man to have worked my entire life in think tanks, government offices, and law firms. Every issue is filled with grim stories of workers mangled by machinery, suffocated by corn in a silo, killed in falls or struck by a careless driver as they worked on the highway, or sometimes, killed in ways so horrible that it beggars the imagination. On any given day, dozens of people are killed in the workplace, and the Cal-OSHA reporter captures only a few of these stories. It does not, and cannot, begin to capture the extent of workplace injuries, since for every one death there are a thousand injuries. And the toll from occupational illness is too slow and insidious to capture, though silicosis, black lung, asbestos disease, and cancer from hundreds of toxic chemicals kill an estimated 50,000 workers every year. Today’s Cal-OSHA Reporter was typical—a perfect reminder that American workers are not sufficiently protected from harm, that OSHA and its sister agencies in the states face an overwhelming challenge with far too few resources, and that employers that put their employees’ lives at risk and take them from their families forever are rarely punished in a way that meets the enormity of what they did or allowed to happen.
Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement: Job Claims Are Pure Baloney
The Senate Finance Committee held hearings this week on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The committee chair, Sen. Max Baucus, claimed that the TTIP could boost U.S. exports to the EU by a third, adding “more than one hundred billion dollars annually to U.S. GDP,” and that it “could support hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the United States.” The statement is remarkable for its sheer audacity in the face of massive evidence of the failure of similar deals to deliver promised benefits. U.S. trade with Mexico after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has cost the United States nearly 700,000 jobs through 2010. U.S. trade with China has certainly failed to deliver on the promised benefits of growing exports. Since that country entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the U.S. has lost 2.7 million jobs through 2011 due to growing trade deficits with China. And the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) has also resulted in growing trade deficits with that country and the loss of more than 40,000 U.S. jobs. Most of the trade-related job losses are concentrated in manufacturing, and growing trade deficits are responsible for a large share of the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment over the past fifteen years.
Using estimates of changes in two-way trade between the U.S. and the EU under the agreement reveals that TTIP is projected to result in a growing U.S. trade deficit with the EU and the loss of at least 71,000 additional U.S. jobs. Senator Baucus, citing advice from Benjamin Franklin, advises the U.S. to “jump quickly at opportunities.” When it comes to evaluating trade deals, Congress and the public would be better served by the common law principle of ‘Caveat Emptor,’ or, let the buyer beware. Congress has a duty to perform their due diligence in evaluating proposed trade and investment agreements before jumping at the next “great deal.” In particular, members should note that Sen. Baucus’s claims that the TTIP “could support hundreds of thousands of new jobs” are pure baloney.