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The Affordable Care Act Creates Jobs

Affordable Care Act

This week marks the first anniversary of the Affordable Care Act - a law that ensures all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care and significantly reduces long-term health care costs.  The Affordable Care Act creates jobs by:

Making key investments in health care jobs. The law makes critical investments to alleviate the shortage of primary health care providers, including physicians, physician assistants, and nurses.  As a first step, in June 2010, funding was released by HHS to support the training of more than 16,000 new primary care providers, including doctors and nurses, over the next five years.     

Lowering costs, especially for small businesses. A study by Harvard Economics Professor David Cutler and USC Health Policy Professor Neeraj Sood found that, because of numerous cost-containment measures that slow the growth of health care spending, the law could create between 250,000 and 400,000 jobs a year over the next 10 years.  The cost-reduction provisions in the law, particularly for small businesses, free up money that otherwise would be spent on health care and allow companies to spend it hiring more workers.

Despite Republican claims that health reform hurts jobs, 1.4 million private sector jobs have been created since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March 2010.  In sharp contrast, under the eight years of President Bush, we lost private sector jobs - losing a total of 673,000 private sector jobs. Of the 1.4 million private sector jobs created since the health care law was enacted, 243,000 of them have been in the health care industry.