Economists and benefits experts call it “job lock”: The phenomenon of workers hanging on to their jobs solely because they need the health benefits. Some argue that that phenomenon hurts the overall economy, by discouraging people from pursuing entrepreneurial ideas or moving to promising jobs that don’t offer benefits. And job lock is a particularly sharp issue for older workers who want to either put out their own shingle or retire early, but are too young to qualify for Medicare. (Those folks, after all, often find that health-insurance is prohibitively expensive when they don’t get it through an employer.)
MarketWatch has written recently about the hope that the Obamacare health reforms could ease job lock by making older workers’ insurance more affordable. Now that President Obama has been reelected and repeal is off the table for a while, Lauren Weber of the Wall Street Journal’s At Work blog is taking another look at the issue. The big question, Weber points out, is whether subsidies and other incentives can do enough to make such insurance accessible: “Pricing is still up in the air,” she pointedly notes. And of course, nothing will be simple: Each state will have its own guidelines, and “subsidies may be a target for Congressional Republicans looking to slow implementation of the law or save money in favor of deficit reduction.” We’ll keep an eye on it as it unfolds.