Don't worry, no political arguments will be made here. That is not worth the effort for the author or the readers of this blog. However, since we are focused on stock picking as investors, it is a valuable exercise to dig into the data and determine if there will be a material impact on U.S. corporate profits because of the Affordable Care Act. After all, if consumers' pockets are squeezed from fewer hours worked each week and/or the need to start buying health insurance for the first time, that would definitely impact the sales and earnings of the companies we are invested in. And that could hurt our portfolios.
Since the September jobs report came out this week I decided to take a look and see if the trend than many people fear as a result of the new healthcare law -- employers shifting full-time workers to part-time status in order to be exempt from being required to provide them with health insurance -- has actually started to take hold. Many people have already argued one way or the other, but most of them have political motivations and rely on a small subset of anecdotal reporting without actually looking at the numbers and reporting the truth.
The good news for our investment portfolio is that this trend has yet to materialize. It certainly could in the future, so we should continue to monitor the situation, but so far so good. Last month there were 27, 335,000 part-time workers, out of a total employed pool of 144,303,000. That comes out to 18.6% of all employed people working part-time (defined as less than 35 hours per week). That compares with 26,893,000 part-time employees during the same month last year, which equated to 19.1% of the 142,974,000 employed persons. Interestingly, part-time workers are actually going down in both absolute terms and relative to full-time workers. These numbers will fluctuate month-to-month, but it clearly has not happened as of yet.
The other potential problem with the Affordable Care Act, and more specifically the requirement that everyone buy health insurance, is that discretionary consumer spending could fall as more of one's after-tax income goes towards insurance and is not spent on discretionary items. We should remember of course that consumer spending counts the same in the GDP calculation regardless of whether or not we buy insurance or other things, so there is no overall economic impact. But, we should expect to see consumers allocate their funds differently, which could impact specific areas of the economy (vacationing, for instance).
But just how much of an impact will this have? Will it be large enough to materially hurt the earnings of many public companies? To gauge the overall potential for that we need to dig into more numbers.
About 15% of the U.S. population does not have health insurance. Let's assume 100% compliance with the Affordable Care Act (either via the purchase of insurance or the payment of the penalty for not doing so). Let's further assume that the net negative financial impact of such compliance comes to 5% of one's income (not an unfair assumption based on insurance premiums). That means that approximately 0.75% of consumer spending (5% x 15%) would be reallocated to healthcare and away from other areas. While that is not a big shift, it would be real.
However, the analysis can't end there. We can't simply conclude that approximately 1% of non-healthcare consumer spending will be lost due to the new law. Why not? Because that would assume that every American earns the same income. In reality, those impacted by the Affordable Care Act (the uninsured), are skewed towards lower and middle income folks. Most wealthier people get health insurance through their full-time jobs and will continue to do so.
Now, the bottom 50% of Americans only make 15% of the income earned nationwide. If we factor that point into the equation, then the overall impact on consumer spending goes from quite small (0.75% per year) to fairly immaterial. In fact, it comes out to something around 0.2% of overall consumer spending per year if we assume that the average uninsured person falls into the 25th percentile of total income.
So what is my conclusion from all of this? Well, I own a lot of shares in consumer-related companies both personally and for my clients, and I am not concerned about the Affordable Care Act taking a meaningful bite out of the profits that those companies are going to generate in the future.