The health care-centric Kaiser Family Foundation–the non-partisan (except for the 98% of donations its employees give to Democrats), non-profit organization–released its 2015 Employer Health Benefits Survey on Tuesday.
Tierney Sneed at Talking Points Memo thought she had a “gotcha!” on her hands after reviewing the survey.
Employers say that Obamacare had only a limited effect in their hiring and hours practices, according to a survey conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust.
The report released Tuesday — revealed that only four percent of the employers with 50 or more workers said they downgraded full-time employees to part-time employees in order to avoid the coverage requirements under the Affordable Care Act. Meanwhile 10 percent of the employers with 50 or more employees* boosted their part-time employees to full-time so the workers would be eligible for coverage. (The ACA requires employers with 100 more or more employees to provide coverage. That mandate will expand to include employers with 50-99 employees in 2016.)
Additionally, 5 percent of those employers said they reduced the number of employees they intended to hire because of the Obamacare coverage requirements while 2 percent increased waiting periods for workers because of the shared responsibility provision.
The findings undermine a common refrain expressed by Obamacare foes, who say the law will kill jobs and stunt economic growth.
Never mind that the asterisk leads to nothing since whatever it was intended for was probably covered in the parenthetical. But go ahead and laugh over Sneed adding that Obamacare has killed jobs right before and right after saying that it hasn’t.
The KFF report and the TPM article about it mislead the lazy or biased reader into believing that hardly any workers have been affected by the Affordable Care Act, also known as the Obamacares. Four percent of employers downgraded full-time workers to part-time, while ten percent of employers upgraded part-time workers to full-time, they explain.
That sounds great, doesn’t it? Ten is greater than four. Obamacare is helping the workers six percent better than it is harming them. Or something.
But all these numbers are rubbish. Do you see what I seeeeee?
Look again. Noticed it yet?
That’s okay, I’ll wait.
All right, the reason why these numbers don’t mean bodiddlyjangles is because they don’t tell you…how many employees were affected. All this tells you is the percentage of employers who have altered the hiring and the status of their employees. It doesn’t even tell you how many employers changed their practices.
Some may still be confused. What are you saying, CO2? How does this not debunk your and your fellow wingnuts’ claims about Obamacare’s awesomeness?
You see, dearly beloved, companies have different amounts of employees. In the instance of full-timers going to part-time and the part-timers going to full-time, four percent does not necessarily mean less than ten percent if that four percent of employers have firms larger than the employers in that ten percent. Does that make sense?
Let’s take four employers versus ten employers, as if each counted for one percentage point. What if those four employers who shifted full-time workers to part-time were, let’s say, Wal-mart, McDonalds, the State of California, and the City of Chicago, each of which employ thousands and thousands of workers. Then you have ten lesser firms in terms of employees–a regional chain of restaurants, a successful but relatively small software company, the State of Wyoming, the City of Tulsa, and six other less significant employers–who moved their workers from part-time to full-time.
No, I don’t know if those employers are doing what I’ve described. I only use them to make the point. The thing about this survey is that nobody knows the most important numbers–actual bodies, actual humans who were affected. As we heard so much during the 2012 campaign season, corporations aren’t people, remember? So how come they’re being treated as such for this survey?
Just to be sure that those numbers weren’t hidden in the Kaiser’s survey somewhere, I looked for the statistics that were cited by TPM as well as in the opening of the survey’s summary. I found those numbers in the final section of the survey’s report.
Nope, the survey showed no total numbers of companies nor total numbers of employees who were affected for better or worse. Only percentages. In fact, all of the figures used in this survey dealt in percentages, not real individual numbers of employers or employees.
Looking at the pertinent full-time-to-part-time/part-time-to-full-time comparison chart, which is shown in the second-to-last exhibit of the report, the footnote at the bottom confirmed my suspicion. And I quote:
Firms were asked if they took the relevant action in response to the Employer-Shared Responsibility Provisions. Firms with 50 or more full-time equivalents were asked these questions. A significant number of employers (mostly large employers) did not know how many FTE’s [full-time equivalents, or the average number of full-time employees] they employed. In these cases, firms with 50 or more workers were asked these questions.
A “significant number of employers…did not know how many FTE’s they employed.” So it didn’t really matter to the people running the survey how many employees went from full-time to part-time or vice versa. All that mattered was the if.
And the percentages in that exhibit only counted toward firms of 50 or more employees that offered health benefits to their workers. That didn’t include firms that don’t offer health benefits, further undermining the pro-Ocare argument that supposedly undermined the anti-Ocare argument.
KFF explained in its methodology that its people surveyed 1,997 random public and private employers with three or more employees. That distorts the statistics even more, since there is an untold number of firms between 3 and 49 employees.
Actually, they surveyed 3,191 employers, but 1,194 employers didn’t care to go past answering the question, “Does your company offer a health insurance program as a benefit to any of your employees?” 43 percent said no. Those 1,194 are not included in the FT-PT/PT-FT stats. So more distortion.
The truth is, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s survey did not verify nor disprove assertions on either side regarding Obamacare’s effects on employment. TPM thinks it’s a slam dunk, however. So does Media Matters.
No. No, it isn’t.
While the ratio of full-time workers to part-time workers might be improving inch by inch, one could legitimately wonder how much better the workforce would be doing if the Obamacares weren’t a factor.
***
Talking Points Memo caught my attention again yesterday with another Obamacare story. Witness the idiocy in the following headline:
“More Whites Gain Obamacare Coverage Than Blacks And Latinos Combined.”
Uh, yeah. Maybe white people being the majority population in this country has something to do with it. Combining the amount of blacks and Hispanics in this country doesn’t come close to the amount of whites in the United States. It makes sense that whites would gain more Obamacare coverage then, wouldn’t it?
Never mind. Like I expect TPM to understand what sense is.
And it says at the end of the first paragraph of the story that “the rate of uninsured is dropping by a greater percentage among minority groups than the white population.”
So the total number is a sure sign of inequality for the minority, but the rate shows that minorities are benefiting more than whites are.
Then how does one explain this TPM headline from some time back?
“Study: Pot Arrest Rates Nearly 4 Times Higher For Blacks Than Whites”
Here we have an instance where the rate indicates inequality, whereas the total as cited in the article indicates something else.
Blacks were arrested [for pot possession] at a rate of 537 per 100,000 people nationally in 2001. In 2010, their arrest rate rose to 716 per 100,000. The 2001 number for white people was 191 per 100,00 [sic] and rose to 192 per 100,000 in 2010, the ACLU said. Despite the disparate rates, far more whites were arrested for marijuana possession in 2010, 460,808 compared to blacks, 286,117.
Depending on the interpretation of the data, alternate headlines could have been written. “161% More Pot Arrests for White Offenders Than Black” or “Nearly 175,000 More Whites Arrested for Pot Than Blacks in 2010,” for example.
Make up your minds, lefties. Disparate rates or disparate totals? Pick one.
I found other examples of selective race-baiting craptistics on Talking Points Memo after a brief search, but ya know what? No. I’ve gone on about that lame website long enough for one sitting.
It’s all about perspective and agendas. Highlight the rate or highlight the total…which works better for The Message? Regardless, we already know how much proggers love manipulating numbers. *Cough*mon! *Cough*re!
Sorry, I was choking on another piece of phony baloney.
By the way, guess who wrote yesterday’s story about whites getting more Obamacares than minorities. It was the same person who wrote yesterday’s story about the Obamacares’ effect on employers–Tierney Sneed.
For the record.
