Sorry, Mr. Puzder: no correlation between exchange premiums and restaurant employment
My colleague Ben Spielberg made this neat scatterplot today in reference to a claim by Labor Secretary designee Andrew Puzder. Puzder claimed that a “government mandated restaurant recession” was caused by rising premiums in the Obamacare exchanges. The idea is that consumers, after paying for health coverage, didn’t have enough left to go out to eat.
If so, we should see restaurant employment falling – or, at least, growing more slowly – in states where Obamacare premiums rose. But, as the scatterplot reveals, there’s little correlation at all between these two variables (and what there is goes the wrong way for Puzder’s case).
There are lots of reasons for that non-correlation, not least of which is that the vast majority of Americans do not get coverage through the exchanges–only 7% obtain coverage through the non-group market. See this Scheiber/Strom piece in the NYT for more details.
As I said therein: “We see different goals between a business owner trying to hold down costs and a national policy maker who ought to be focused on making sure that the benefits of growth are fairly and broadly shared. For a guy like Puzder, suppressing labor costs is a good day at work. For the labor secretary, that’s not the goal.”
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This was reposted from On the Economy.
