Obamacare Causes Layoffs, Kills Jobs

At Bloomberg News, CEO Andrew Puzder explains how the 2010 healthcare law is preventing jobs from being created and resulting in layoffs.

Puzder notes that his restaurant company, CKE Restaurants, which operates Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. restaurants, “will have to cut spending on new restaurant construction,” in order to “offset higher health-care expenses,” even though “building new restaurants is how” the company creates jobs.  Puzder argues that the increase in the company’s healthcare costs will “more than consume” the amount it ”spent on new restaurant construction last year, leaving nothing for growth.”  It “will also need to reduce” its “capital spending,” even though such spending creates jobs and enables the restaurant company to improve its infrastructure and maintain its business. Thus, its “ability to create new jobs could vanish.”Puzder also points to similar experiences at other companies.  As he notes, “Grady Payne, chief executive officer of Connor Industries Inc., a supplier of cut lumber and assembled wood products” with 450 employees, who has laid out the unpleasant options facing “his company under the health-care law, each of which would cost $1 million or more,”  which is “‘more than the company makes.’ [Payne] concluded that his company’s goals have turned “from ‘hire-and-grow’ to ‘cut-and- survive.’”

Similarly, Victoria Braden, the president and CEO of Braden Benefits Strategies Inc., “a corporate employee-benefits adviser”, said

adoption of the law 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.”

Earlier, John Stossel of Fox News reported on how Obamacare is stopping businesses from hiring, and interviewed affected business owners on his TV show.

Obamacare will ultimately reduce the number of people employed in the U.S. by around 800,000, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Obamacare will eventually raise the cost of insurance by a massive 55-85 percent in Ohio, according to one study.  It will harm life-saving medical innovation, noted the Harvard Medical School Dean and others. It taxes medical devices and cosmetic surgery, and raises taxes starting in 2013 on investors. Obamacare also breaks many campaign promises, and increases state budget deficits.  Even liberal businessmen are increasingly worried about the growing cost of big government and expanding bureaucratic red tape: Democratic businessman Steve Wynn called Obama “the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime.”