Fix Health Care Policy

Obamacare is approaching its three-year anniversary next week. And while it’s having an impact on nearly all Americans in one way or another, businesses are facing some of the biggest challenges related to the law.

Heritage hosted a panel Monday to examine the implications of the Affordable Care Act. Robert Graboyes, a senior fellow for health and economics at the National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation, explained the three options employers face with Obamacare: stunt business growth, shrink employee hours, or minimize the damage the mandate does on the employer’s wallet.

That’s the case for Mike Ruffer, who works in restaurant business. Ruffer purchased the franchise rights from Five Guys in 2004 with a commitment to build 11 restaurants. Ruffer owns eight Five Guys in North Carolina, but worries about opening new restaurants because of the uncertainty related to impending federal regulations.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: businesses, employer mandate, fines, impact, job loss, ObamaCare, stunted growth

It seems that every day now brings another business owner in the news talking about cutting workers’ hours or making other cost-cutting moves in anticipation of Obamacare’s impact in 2013.

Here are just a few of the business owners’ comments on the health care law:

• “We’ve calculated it will [cost] some millions of dollars across our system. So what does that say—that says we won’t build more restaurants. We won’t hire more people,” Zane Tankel, chairman and CEO of Apple-Metro, which runs 40 Applebee’s restaurants. >> Tweet this quote
• “There’s no other way we can survive it, because we think it will cost us 50 cents a sandwich. That’s just the actual cost. If you have 40 or 50 employees at a restaurant, and the penalty is $2,000, and you’re going to pay $80,000 or $100,000 penalty, there goes the profit in your restaurant.”—Jimmy John Liautaud, founder of Jimmy John’s subs, who said he was considering cutting workers’ hours to come in under the Obamacare mandate threshold. >> Tweet this quote
• “It’s a great concept. We want to have everyone insured. The problem is, who is going to pay for it and how are we going to accomplish this?” — John Metz, who operates roughly 40 Denny’s locations and five Hurricane Grill & Wings franchises in Florida, Virginia, and Georgia, and has said he may have to add an Obamacare surcharge to his menus. >> Tweet this quote
• “New unit construction will cease if we have to allocate moneys for that construction to the [Affordable Care Act]. And building new restaurants is how we create jobs.” — Andy Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants, which owns Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

Heritage’s Alyene Senger explains that these businesses are responding to Obamacare’s employer mandate, which has a job-killing effect:

Obamacare requires all businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health coverage for their workers or pay a $2,000 penalty for each employee after the first 30 workers. The employer mandate creates incentives for businesses to avoid higher costs by, for example, hiring part-time employees instead of full-time employees, since businesses will not be penalized for failing to provide health insurance to part-time employees….Businesses can also avoid penalties by keeping the number of employees under the mandate threshold of 50, which further discourages creating new jobs.

These businesses’ plans are only the effects based on what we know about Obamacare. There are still many, many crucial details that we don’t know. Health and Human Services (HHS) just released some of the new rules that will govern what kind of coverage insurers must offer —and Heritage’s experts are still going through the 300-plus pages of regulations to sort out what they mean.

Read the rest on The Foundry…

Tags: businesses, cutting worker hours, employer mandate, higher costs, ObamaCare, regulations

During his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama barely discussed his health care law. But that doesn’t mean Americans must remain in the dark about how the unpopular health law will impact each and every one of them. Heritage has compiled a series of videos that highlight how individuals and families will be affected by the new law.

Business Owners

Obamacare’s new taxes and mandates on business are a hindrance to economic growth and job creation. The law requires that employers provide health insurance to their employees or face a fine. As the cost of health insurance continues to increase under Obamacare, employers will face increasingly steep costs to keep employees insured and avoid the penalties. According to research by McKinsey and Company, close to one-third of employers says they will definitely or probably stop covering employees once Obamacare is fully implemented; this increased to 50 percent after the law had been explained to employers in greater detail.  (Read the rest on The Foundry…)

Tags: businesses, families, individuals, mandates, ObamaCare, Seniors, State of the Union address, taxes, videos

This Wednesday marks the first anniversary of Obamacare. While advocates spend the week highlighting the new law’s effects on different groups of Americans, we will do the same. A review of the facts on the ground and the conclusions of Heritage research over the past year reveal the far-reaching negative consequences of the new law.

Today, the argument is that Obamacare is good for American business. Though there are sure to be those who experience some benefit under the new law, its overall effect will be to cause great harm to job growth and the economy at large. By and large, Obamacare will also fail to remove the obstacles that smaller employers face to provide health insurance for workers. (Read the rest at The Foundry…)

Tags: businesses, job losses, low-income workers, Obamacare anniversary, regulations