I think CodeToad is talking about total labor participation and while you are talking about the marginal jobless market. CodeToad may very well be talking from a squeezed middle class citizen's point of view. You may be talking from a trader trading around government stats for the day.
We know that the median income had decreased significantly over the past six years. And we know that the median wealth of the average citizen has decreased by tens of thousands in the last decade. Both your posts are interesting in light of this post.
More Bad News for the Middle Class and Their Health Care
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3190003/posts
In the hospitals, we see the consequences. While the poor and the illegal immigrants get absolutely free care, the middle-class patients are collapsing financially under the strain of their deductibles and their lost income from their time off work, not to mention the additional stress of their illness. In our clinics, sick patients are choosing to forego testing, medicines, and surgery that they need solely because of cost. Instead they are living with their illnesses, often with cheap antibiotics as a means of delaying the inevitable.
To make matters worse, the patients getting their health care for free will ask for taxi vouchers, food stipends, and the like right in front of these other people, never thinking that what they are requesting is an affront to the sensibilities of the people paying their bills with our tax dollars. Seeing the middle class visibly suffer like this when the president told them during the elections that they would see their costs “go down $2,500 per family” is a heinous outcome of a preposterous government overreach.
That “$2,500” lie is costing people big time. People do not read the fine print on their ObamaCare insurance policies. They fail to see the $5,100 deductible or know what they mean. Once guy at work was bragging that without ObamaCare he would not have insurance. When told of his high deductible he scoffed, but when he used the policy he found out the hard way that he has to pay 100% of the bill because he had not met the “family deductible” of $7,600.