Time to Get Tough (15 page)

It's sad to see just how many citizens—some of them smart people—got duped into believing Obama's bait and switch sales pitch on Obamacare. Take, for instance, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Schultz did a terrific job of turning Starbucks around. But when it came to Obamacare, he took the bait hook, line, and sinker. “When I was invited to the White House prior to health care being reformed, I was very supportive of the president's plan,” Schultz said. However, after Schultz and his team studied the massive bill more closely, he changed his tune. “As the bill is currently written and if it was going to land in 2014 under the current guidelines, the pressure on small businesses, because of the [individual] mandate, is too great.”
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That's putting it mildly. A September 2011 report by UBS, the highly respected financial services company, said, “Arguably the biggest impediment to hiring (particularly hiring of less skilled workers) is healthcare reform, which has the added drawback of straining state and federal budgets.”
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The report went on to explain in simple language why Obamacare is such a jobs killer:

And liberals scratch their heads and wonder why businesses don't want to hire?

Simple: companies know Obama is anti-business, and his government-run health-care takeover has created a major disincentive to hire new workers. So business leaders aren't hiring. Instead, they will just ship more jobs overseas or automate their systems with machines. Just do some simple math. If you have a business with fifty employees, would you hire that fatal fifty-first employee and instantly subject yourself to a $100,000+
penalty ($2,000 for every employee in your company) for having the audacity to create more jobs, enlarge your business, and stimulate the economy? No. You would either put a freeze on hiring (in the hopes Obamacare will be repealed or overturned by the Supreme Court), outsource jobs to other countries, or create a second company (which will grow more slowly than if you concentrated your resources) to avoid the penalty. That's where we are today, and that's why we have record unemployment. This isn't rocket science.

Obamacare also slaps companies who already insure their employees with $3,000 fines per employee if the health-care benefits they offer aren't up to Obama's standards. The White Castle hamburger chain ran the numbers and discovered that these new regulations will eat up 55 percent of their net income after 2014.
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How in the world can anyone expect businesses to hire new workers under these kinds of insane requirements?

Not surprisingly, the instant businesses began crunching the numbers, thousands of businesses and states began asking for “waivers” from Obamacare. So far just under 1,500 waivers have been granted.
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And guess who the big winners have been? President Obama's biggest backers who championed Obamacare! More than 50 percent of the waivers have gone to union members. And in the recent round of new waivers, 20 percent of them went to Nancy Pelosi's district.
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You just can't make this stuff up. How is it fair to let Obama's pals off the hook and grant them waivers but force the rest of America to be stuck with Obamacare? Mr. President, you need to give all Americans a waiver!

What's incredible is that Obamacare hasn't even kicked in yet and already it's doing tremendous damage. During the health-care debate, Obama swore that passing Obamacare would “bring down the cost of health care for families, for businesses, and for the federal government.” He also said that passing his plan would “lower premiums for the typical family by $2,500 a year.”
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In September 2011, the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks annual employer health insurance, released a study revealing that health insurance premiums leapt 9 percent in 2011. As Senator Orrin Hatch put it, “The president's promise that his partisan health law would lower costs was just empty rhetoric.”
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Liberals could hardly believe it—they couldn't understand how health-care costs could have risen so much when their hero Barack Obama had promised that they wouldn't. Obama claimed his socialized medicine plan would immediately “bend the cost curve downward.” He said the bill's pre-2014 requirements, such as forcing employers to cover millions of adult “children” up to twenty-six years old on their parents' health plans, would push costs down. Well, the Kaiser report found that 2.3 million adult “kids” have been added so far in the wake of Obamacare passing. And guess what happened? Under Obama, the average family's health insurance premiums have risen $2,393. That's almost the exact opposite of what the president promised. How's that for “hope and change”?
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As business and economics columnist Robert Samuelson concluded, “The study reminds us that runaway costs are the health system's core
problem; [Obamacare] does nothing to solve it—and would actually make it worse.... If roughly 30 million or so Americans get insurance and no basic changes are made in the delivery system, then added demand will lead to higher costs, longer waiting periods, or both.... [Obamacare] was also bound to raise the costs of hiring workers by compelling employers to provide expensive coverage. That prospect can't be helping job creation.”
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Looking back, it's incredible that anyone believed Obama and Nancy Pelosi's wild rhetoric. Remember when Pelosi promised us that passing Obamacare would magically create jobs? Her exact words were even bolder. Pelosi said, “It's about jobs. In its life, it [Obamacare] will create four million jobs—400,000 jobs almost immediately.”
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400,000 jobs almost immediately
. . . incredible, isn't it? Liberals were fools to have believed such garbage, especially when there were so many small business owners pleading with the government not to crush their ability to create jobs.

Instead of creating new jobs, Obamacare is destroying jobs. And the worst part is yet to come, since the truly painful provisions don't kick in until 2014. Businesses like Boeing, Caterpillar, and Deere & Company are already tallying up the job-killing costs of Obamacare. The numbers are ugly. These companies will now have to find $150 million, $100 million, and $150 million respectively—and that's just the cost to meet
one provision
in the new law.
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Where does Obama think these sums will come from? Does he not understand that businesses exist to make a profit? Every time government adds a cost to a business, that company either has to pass the cost along to consumers, fire or stop hiring workers, or both. These three
companies are big enough to absorb Obamacare's body blow and still survive. But what about small businesses that are struggling to grow and would love to hire more workers? Those are the companies that will suffer the most under Obamacare. And don't forget, small businesses are our biggest jobs creators. In fact, over the last fifteen years, small businesses have been responsible for 64 percent of net new jobs.
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How many jobs will Obamacare kill? A study from the National Federation of Independent Business found that Obamacare could mean the loss of 1.6 million jobs, 66 percent of which would be from small businesses.
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Obama will probably dismiss that study because it comes from an organization that has the word “business” in its name. Fine. Then maybe he should listen to the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, who said during congressional testimony that the bill would kill 800,000 full-time jobs in the first decade alone.
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Bottom line: as Minnesota Congressman John Kline put it, “To suggest [Obamacare] doesn't undermine job creation is to deny reality.”
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In addition to killing jobs, Obamacare also destroys a patient's right to choose the insurance and doctor he wants. Whole books have been written about what's wrong with Obamacare and how we can improve health care without wrecking our economy, like
The Truth about Obamacare
by Pacific Research Institute President Sally C. Pipes. But even a casual observer can see that Obama's rhetoric doesn't align with reality. Remember when Obama promised us that “if you've got health insurance, you like your
doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you”?
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Yeah, well that was a flat out lie. Here's why: once the law goes into full effect in 2014, one out of three employers plan to drop employee health benefits entirely and just pay the government penalty.
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That means those workers will be shoved into the government's subsidized insurance exchanges. And nothing will make liberals happier.

As liberals see it, pushing businesses to dump their current health-care plans and funnel their workers into the government-run health-care plans is a backdoor way to drag America closer to a so-called “single payer system,” otherwise known as total government-run health care. As Howard Dean joyfully said, “Most small businesses are not going to be in the health insurance business anymore after this thing goes into effect.”
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So the line Obama sold the country about everyone being able to keep the plan they have was a total con job. As the president knew all along, millions of workers' current insurance plans will be scrapped entirely. Obamacare is nothing more than a lurch toward total government-controlled health care.

It's crazy that this plan was even proposed—America is a debtor nation. How in the world does it make sense to create a budget-busting government program like Obamacare when the United States is already $15 trillion in the hole? It's financial suicide.

The original price tag Obama and his liberal supporters quoted us was also a total sham. Not wanting to quote a price that used the word “trillion,” Obama and Pelosi made sure to jigger the numbers so that he could claim Obamacare would cost $940 billion over the decade. Yet as Dr. Jeffrey H. Anderson points out, “Even this colossal tally is like the introductory price quoted by a cell phone
provider. It's the price before you pay for minutes, fees, and overcharges—and before the price balloons after the introductory offer expires.” Using the CBO's numbers, Anderson calculates that Obamacare's actual cost from 2014 (when the plan fully kicks in) to 2023 will be $2.0 trillion, more than double what Obama and Pelosi claimed, in order to insure the 30 million Americans Obama says are uninsured.
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As usual, liberals play a shell game with how much they're planning to screw taxpayers for. The Obama administration said they would pay for the program by slashing $ 575 billion from Medicare and make up the rest in tax hikes. I think we can count on tax hikes—lots of them.

Now take a closer look at that number of uninsured Americans—30 million. Throughout the health-care debate, Obama chronically talked about the “46 million uninsured Americans.” Over and over we had that number pounded into us like a nail. Then, all of a sudden, Obama decided that, no, the actual number of people who couldn't get health-care coverage was 30 million. That's quite a drop! But of course he used the smaller number after having blasted the inflated number far and wide.

But pretend for a moment that the 46 million was real. According to the ultra right-wing
New York Times
, here's how that number breaks down “with the caveat that there is overlap in these numbers” (which is why they don't exactly add up to 46 million). One out of five of the people he claimed were uninsured weren't even U.S. citizens! Another 13.7 million have plenty of money to buy health care (they make more than $75,000 a year) but choose not to get it. Eleven million poorer Americans are Medicaid or SCHIP eligible but just haven't enrolled yet. That leaves 13 million young people (ages nineteen to twenty-nine) who are either fresh out of college, can afford insurance but think they're invincible, are
in-between jobs, or who are searching for jobs.
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There's no doubt some of these folks need a safety net under them until they start their careers. The question is, was it worth it to jeopardize the world's greatest health-care system and shackle America with $2 trillion of additional debt to address the temporary health-care needs of 4 percent of the country? Or could we have devised a smarter, more efficient, less expensive solution that would have accomplished the same goal? Only a fool would choose the former over the latter.

We may get lucky and have the Supreme Court declare Obamacare unconstitutional. After all, there's no doubt that the government forcing all citizens to buy a product is a direct violation of the Commerce Clause. That would set a very dangerous precedent. “If Congress may require that individuals purchase a particular good or service,” says Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, “we could simply require that Americans buy certain cars.... For that matter, we could attack the obesity problem by requiring Americans to buy fruits and vegetables.”
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Hatch is right. The individual mandate is a massive federal overreach and is clearly unconstitutional. But as every conservative knows, the Supreme Court tramples on the Constitution all the time. So it's anyone's guess what they will do.