Delve into the Winston-Salem Journal‘s article about Novant Health’s decision to cut 289 jobs — with the largest impact in Winston-Salem — and you’ll find the following:
[Novant president and CEO Carl] Armato said four main reasons drove the decision: a national mandate to lower health care spending, the poor economy that has prompted less use of health care services such as elective surgeries and outpatient testing, lower reimbursements from Medicaid and Medicare and greater costs for charity care.
This leads to an explanation of the headline. Henry Hazlitt‘s Economics In One Lesson extends into a book-length argument the following thesis:
The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
Hazlitt goes on to highlight earlier work from Frederic Bastiat on the “seen and the unseen.” Even if the immediate impacts of a policy are clear, it’s important to look beyond them and search for long-term impacts, even for groups not targeted by the policy.
No Obama administration staffer ever said, “Enact this policy, and Novant Health will cut jobs!” But it’s not hard to label these job cuts as unseen consequences of ObamaCare and other policies that have handicapped economic growth.
