Essay: Eight Business Strategies for dealing with ObamaCare

Business Strategies for dealing with ObamaCare.

How will companies deal with ObamaCare?  The answers must be of great concern to the Federal Government as it seeks to add balance to the prohibitive costs of this poorly written bill.  Cost cutting choices that will be made have to do with the following: 

1.  Reduce that spending normally used to maintain company infrastructure,  a jobs creator, in and of itself. 

2.  Increase part-time labor (defined in the health care bill as "working under 30 hours per week). 

3.  Decrease the number of full-time employees.

4.  Revisit and reduce retirement benefit packages. 

5.  Automation will be viewed with renewed interest.  Machinery does not require benefit costing. 

6.  Ordering product for use in manufacturing from outside this country, thus,  cutting infrastructure and benefit costs. 

7.  Moving a percentage of the workforce outside the U.S.,  as has G.E. (for example). 

8.  Invest outside this country.  

Understand that virtually no thought was given to any of the above considerations,  as this bill was being "written."  

Now,  it is time to pay the Pied Piper for all the bribery and closed door wheeling and dealing that produced the first 2,700 pages of this bill. I say "first 2,700 pages"  because the actual bill has yet to be fully written. That job will not be completed until 2014 or 2015.    An additional 60,000 to 100,000 pages will be crafted as unnamed and unelected  bureaucrats draft the "working parts" of this monstrosity.  In the end and as things stand at this moment,  it is this very ambiguity that is adding to the devastation of our jobs related economy.  Absolutely no one in business or in politics, has a clue as to the end costs to business.  To say otherwise to lie to the American people.  And,  to think, this  is all on the Democrats.  They,  alone, get to "share" the blame for this piece of idiocy in perpetuity.  

Anecdotal evidence demanding a concerned re-evaluation of ObamaCare. 

Andrew Puzder, chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants Inc., testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on Health Care, District of Columbia, Census and the National Archives, on July 28 of 2011.  In prepared comments,  Puzder reviewed reasons for an immediate 18 million dollar cost annual estimate to his company due to health “reform” costs, alone.  Understand that ObamaCare is more than doubling CKE's annual health care costs.  Parts of this report can be viewed in an article written for Bloomberg (December, 26, 2011). 

Pultzer contrasted this $18 million increase against the company’s annual investment in new construction for last year of $8 million. New construction is how Pultzer’s company grows itself, as is the case with most businesses.  ObamaCare, of necessity,  will sharply curtail that activity at a huge cost to job creation in this country. 

Victoria Braden, the president and CEO of Braden Benefits Strategies Inc., a corporate employee-benefits adviser based in Johns Creek, Georgia, also testified in July of this years (2011) that adoption of the law (March of 2010) led to immediate job cuts at her company as she scaled back an expansion into a new line of business. Obamacare “is devastating to my business, expensive for me and my clients to administer, and works against our goals of helping businesses to expand, and putting people back to work,” she said (see her company's written report left with the House Oversight Committee dated July 28, 2011.

Text by J Smithson, editor.

Update:  Chief executives have responsibilities to their existing employees, customers and shareholders. We simply cannot risk their jobs and their money by investing when we know that legislation like Obamacare will make it so much harder to earn a profit. The sooner both parties in Washington understand this, the sooner we can all begin looking for ways to strengthen the social safety net without hurting the economy. --  Andrew Pultzer.