Job creators: How Obamacare is killing jobs
Why is our economy failing to turn around? Why are job creators having problems creating jobs?
One word. ObamaCare.
Three of the nation’s larger employers sat down with journalist John Stossel on his Fox Business Channel program. Stossel describes the interview for Reason magazine.
You may watch the interviews here.
Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, explained to Stossel how ObamaCare prevents employers from creating new businesses by imposing future costs that have yet to be determined.
“If I was trying to get you to fund a new business I had started and you asked me what my payroll was going to be three years from now per employee, if I went to the deepest specialist in the industry, he can’t tell me what it’s actually going to cost, let alone what I’m going to be responsible for,” said Anderson.
“You would think a piece of legislation more than a thousand pages long would at least be clear about the specifics. But a lot of those pages say: ‘The secretary will determine …’ That means the secretary of Health and Human Services will announce the rules sometime in the future. How can a business make plans in such a fog?,” writes Stossel
Even worse, ObamaCare endangers the health of Americans who can’t afford insurance on their own.
John Allison, former CEO of BB&T, explained to Stossel how Obamacare encourages employers to drop health insurance for employees. Under the law, employers are forced to insure their employees. Employers who fail to insure their employees, but the $2,000 penalty is lower than the cost of a policy.
“What that means is in theory every company ought to dump their plan on the government plan and pay the penalty,” he said. “So you don’t really know what the cost is because it’s designed to fail.” Companies that continue to offer insurance would run higher operating costs, which could force them out of business in a slow economy — costing thousands of jobs.
Who are hardest hit by ObamaCare’s onslaught of costs, regulation and government mandates? Those on the lower rungs of the employment ladder.
“An owner of 12 IHOPs told me that he can’t expand his business because he can’t afford the burden of Obamacare. Many of his waitresses work part time or change jobs every few months. He hadn’t been insuring them, but Obamacare requires him to. He says he can’t make money paying a $2,000 penalty for every waitress, so he’s cancelled his plans to expand. It’s one more reason why job growth hasn’t picked up post-recession,” writes Stossel.
Want to kill jobs? Inject the economy with higher costs, more government regulations and more government mandates — and do it in an arbitrary, unpredictable manner.
In that vein, ObamaCare is a lethal dose of economic poison, and the poorest Americans are suffering the most.