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Well, as an entrepreneur and having started my first company at age 12, you might have guessed that I am not a proponent of ObamaCare. In fact I see it is a nightmare, and yet many people don't agree, they believe that somehow this will bring equality to healthcare, and help the estimated 38 million people who don't have healthcare insurance. Still, if 38 million people all of a sudden have healthcare insurance, and if those people don't have to pay for it, the demand for healthcare services will increase drastically almost right away.
Where is all that money going to come from you ask. Well, what's going to happen is everyone who has healthcare insurance will have to pay more, and supply and demand will dictate increases in prices, and the government will go nearly bankrupt trying to provide payments for all of this healthcare, or they will ration it, and then no one gets decent services.
Still, as a businessman I would say that's the least of our problems, in fact, I'd say it's a lot worse. Not long ago an acquaintance told me that I didn't know what I was talking about, that ObamaCare wouldn't hurt business, but it would make workers happier, therefore they would work harder and have more productivity.
Again, from everything I've read I just don't see how the Affordable Health Care Act is going to do any good for anyone. The beginning estimates are already stating that it will cost an employer an average of $4500 per year or more per employee. There's a lot of businesses where that amount of money would wipe out their profit completely.
They are already running on razor thin margins during the recession, and it looks as if with all the government spending and the trillions of dollars being spent by the Obama Administration, that things are only going to get worse, and with increased taxes consumers will have less money to spend, therefore getting out of the recession probably won't be possible.
MSNBC had an interesting article on their Money Section on November 20, 2012 titled; "Why restaurants freak out over ObamaCare - Papa John's, Denny's and others are as worried about employee pay as health insurance," by Jason Notte which noted;
"The report found that in 2010, 50% of restaurant employees worked part-time "i.e. under 35 hours per week." Under the Affordable Care Act, once an employee puts in 30 or more hours a week, he or she is "full-time equivalent,"
And;
"Under the new law, health insurance premiums charged by employers to employees can't exceed 9.5% of an employee's household income. The largest franchise group in the world, the International Franchise Association, issued a report stating that as many as 38% of employers may be at risk of violating that particular provision."
It seems to me that most people are taking into consideration all of these issues, and these are only a few of the challenges we face as employers with the ObamaCare nightmare. Right now many entrepreneurs and business owners are starting to get quite stressed out, meanwhile their lawyers and accountants still haven't read up on all this, and they don't even know how to advise anyone, because in reality there are very few people who have even read those 1600 pages of law. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank.
