Speaker Pelosi, About Those 4 Million Obamacare Jobs…?
Among the many ways they tried to sell their unpopular health care law, Democrats claimed the measure would be a job creator. At the White House health summit in February 2010, Speaker Pelosi claimed that Obamacare would create “4 million jobs – 400,000 jobs almost immediately.” One of those supposed job-creating initiatives was the Health Care Innovation Challenge; when announced last November, HHS officials claimed it would “broaden the workforce.” Politico checked in on this “workforce broadening” initiative in an article (subscription required) today, and, well, read for yourself:
Just how many jobs will be created as a result of the Health Care Innovation Awards, announced Tuesday as a part of President Barack Obama’s “We Can’t Wait” initiative?
Well, dozens.
About $2 million in funding awarded to a project at George Washington University is expected to result in just three new jobs, according to the project profiles listed on the website of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
Another $2.5 million to an awardee in Tennessee — Vanderbilt University Medical Center — will create a total of 4.6 new jobs.
And one program in Minnesota, a community-based medical home for adults with disabilities, will receive more than $1.75 million in funding — but doesn’t claim it will create any jobs at all.
The Administration tried to spin these results by saying the program is likely “to result in several thousand folks either hired or retrained.” (Hmmm, where have we heard that “jobs saved or created” phrase before…?) But the reality is that, as job creation efforts go, the program’s results after six months have been massively underwhelming.
Conservatives have consistently stated that spending $2.6 trillion on new entitlements – funded by massive tax increases – will destroy jobs in the economy. This week’s developments, showing how HHS has failed at its attempts to turn Obamacare into “stimulus redux,” further confirm that fact.