The new health care law, the ‘Affordable Care Act,’ is actually making it less affordable for employers to provide coverage to employees.
Under the Affordable Care Act, large employers must provide health coverage to all full-time workers and their dependents or face a penalty. The mandate applies to all companies with 50 or more full-time employees. The penalty for not providing coverage is $2,000 per worker.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan policy group based in Washington DC, employers would end up paying an average of $4,664 for insurance for a single worker and $11,429 for a family.
Many people, including myself, predicted that this would result in more and more people being pushed on to government insurance, specifically Medicaid.
Check out the results.
Darden Restaurants, which owns the Olive Garden and Red Lobster chains, made some full-time workers part time in a test last year, but changed course after attracting negative publicity.
This means that they’ll try again later, once the publicity dies down.
And why shouldn’t they? Restaurants and other private companies — you know, the kind who employ people — are not charities. They’re profit-making entities. If you impose new expenses on them by force, they have to make up the money somewhere.
What else are private companies to do, if not convert full-time employees with benefits to part-time employees without benefits?
Imagine the screams in Washington DC if companies started closing down. Or, imagine the screams and lawsuits if corporations cut pay in order to pay for the elevated health insurance costs brought about by the ‘Affordable Care Act.’
Private business cannot win. They’re damned no matter what they do — or don’t do. No matter what goes wrong economically, the private sector will always be blamed. No matter what goes right economically, politicians will gladly take the credit. This is an inversion of justice too hideous to contemplate, and so absurd it’s almost laughable.
More evidence:
David Dillon, chief executive of the Cincinnati-based Kroger supermarket chain, told The Financial Times that some companies might pay the penalty because it was cheaper than the actual insurance cost.
If employers opt to pay the penalty, government will be forced to cover millions of more people via Medicaid. This is just what critics of this bill such as myself predicted would happen, and were (in some cases) savagely criticized for doing so.
Of course, the people who hate private property and free enterprise will simply blame the for-profit sector for everything. ‘Those greedy businesses shouldn’t be doing this.’ Seriously? They shouldn’t be trying to make a profit? Why not? That’s what the private, for-profit sector does. That’s the only ways jobs are created. Plus: If you take the risk and do the work, you deserve that profit.
You see, it’s easy for politicians to pass a law and then send the bill on to the private sector. And to a point, it’s easy for the politicians and the other elites to tell us, ‘Well, if those companies weren’t so greedy and trying to make a profit, there would be no problems.’
The dead end of this road is simply to destroy private enterprise and profit. Of course, nobody (other than outright socialists or communists) wish to go that far; but this is the only place where everything we’re now doing can lead.
We’re watching it in slow motion, right now, as the ‘Affordable Care Act’ ends up putting most patients on the completely bankrupt government programs—programs which, by the way, are reimbursing doctors and other providers less by the day. Doctors with pay cuts? How good is that for patients?
Is this what the majority who voted for this legislation wanted?
Americans desperately need a for-profit, private sector-oriented, totally free market for medicine. You know, the kind of free market that drives innovation and market-based price controls in the computer/tech sector.
The tragedy is that most of us don’t even know it. And our official “leaders” refuse to tell us the truth.
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