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 One prediction of the impact of the healthcare law, commonly known
as Obamacare, was that the ACA would end "job lock" - the phenomenon
of workers hanging onto jobs just for the health insurance while
waiting to become eligible for Medicare at age 65.
Instead, the ACA’s guaranteed issue of insurance would let them
leave the world of full-time work for more flexible self-employment,
start businesses or launch encore careers - or just retire.
A 2013 study by the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center and
Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute, for instance,
forecast that health reform would boost the number of self-employed
people by 1.5 million.
But new research shows the ACA has not turned the job-lock key - at
least not yet. A team of University of Michigan researchers studied
Census Bureau employment data for 2014 - the first full year of the
law’s implementation - and found no evidence of a higher rate of
retirement, or a shift to part-time work, for Americans age 55 to
64.
“We looked for it. In fact we really looked hard for it,” said Helen
Levy, a research associate professor at the University of Michigan’s
Institute for Social Research. “This just hasn’t been the labor
supply Armageddon some were predicting.”
Still, the ACA has had an enormous, positive impact on older
Americans.
At the end of the ACA’s first full year, the share of Americans ages
50 to 64 without health insurance had fallen by nearly a third, to
just 8 percent, according to research by the Urban Institute and
AARP. The uninsured rate was even lower in the 27 states that chose
to expand Medicaid eligibility - just 5.5 percent at the end of last
year.
It is too early to document improved health, but Levy and other
experts think the higher coverage rates will mean healthier seniors
in the years ahead.
“For these folks, health insurance really matters,” Levy said.
“They’re the ones who tend to get sick, and they have a nest egg to
protect. It really is a matter of life and death.”
Levy thinks uncertainty about the ACA may have kept some older
workers on the job who otherwise would have exited.
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In part, she credits the lengthy, failed battles by Republicans to
repeal the law in Congress or upend it in the courts. Another
factor, she thinks, was the messy launch of the federal health
exchange website, Healthcare.gov, and the ensuing bad publicity.
“If I am an older worker and working primarily for the health
insurance, that means I’m a cautious, careful person - perhaps
someone with a serious health problem or a spouse with a problem,"
says Levy.
She adds that if people were in that situation on January 1, 2014,
they would not retire so fast. They would want to make sure this new
insurance will be there for all the years needed until they get to
Medicare.
With the initial kinks worked out of the system and legal challenges
foiled, workers may well head for the exits in the years ahead. “I
think it’s too early to know,” says Linda Blumberg, senior fellow at
the Urban Institute and a co-author of the 2013 forecast.
Indeed, entrepreneurship in this age group is becoming more
commonplace. People age 55-65 accounted for 26 percent of all
startups last year, up from 15 percent in 1996, according to the
Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.
Interest in encore careers rose by 17 percent from 2011 to 2014,
according to a national survey conducted by Encore.org.
(The writer is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his
own.)
(Editing by Beth Pinsker and Cynthia Osterman)
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