The Economic Consequences of the ACA Notch

There is great interest in how the labor market will respond to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Much of the popular discussion focuses on the implications of the newly-implemented and widely-anticipated employer mandate, which requires firms with 50 or more workers to provide health insurance for full-time employees (defined as workers with 30 or more hours per week). The employer mandate, unsurprisingly, creates strong incentives for companies to scale back employee hours (“29 hour work weeks”) and lay off workers or consolidate part-time jobs into full-time jobs in order to get under the 50 employee threshold. There is comparatively less discussion of the incentives faced by workers. Although the Congressional Budget Office has provided estimates and discussion of the pertinent labor market effects, one issue that tends to get lost in all of this is how increasing a household’s income creates certain “notches” in a household’s budget constraint. By “notches”, economists mean very large changes in the subsidy (known as the “Premium Tax Credit”) received by a household for extremely small changes in income. These notches are well known in other transfer programs, particularly the “Medicaid notch” and the “public housing notch”. The ACA notch occurs in both states that expanded their Medicaid program, as well as those that didn’t. To illustrate the sheer magnitude of the ACA notch, it is helpful to examine ACA subsidies for different individuals. F...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs