April, 2015, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: Meaningless Signs, Low Opinions, and High Costs

Every month for the past few years we have had to dedicate any number of posts each month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. This piece of legislation has to be the worst piece ever passed, given its detrimental effects on millions of Americans and their families. From losing access to their preferred insurance policies, doctor and hospitals to higher insurance costs to great risk of identity theft, the disasters from this law have been never ending and always a fiasco.

And the totally sad thing about the whole effort is that the legislation will never be successful in reducing health care costs in this country since it never addressed the root causes of the high health care costs in this country. This is the third post in this month's discussion of recent disasters and we will still at least one more beyond today to get all of the latest disasters in:

1) Obama Care has never been the most popular piece of legislation ever passed. In fact, since its inception, Gallup’s opinion tracking of the approval rating of the law has almost always shown that those that disapprove of the law has been higher than those that approve of the law:



As the chart shows, in the current round of polling, 50% of those polled disapproved of the law and 44% approved. While the case could be made that the gap is closing, keep in mind that millions of Americans are now getting free medical care via Medicaid, the overwhelming winner under Obama Care, a reality that will eventually affect all taxpayers but short term, those with free Medicaid coverage may be contributing to the more narrow gap.Over time, those that claim Obama Care is has hurt their families has always been higher than those that claim Obama Care has helped their family:



What is interesting is that a consistent majority of those polled have seen no impact on their families. Thus,m five years after the legislation was passed, the majority of Americans are unaffected by the most controversial piece of legislation passed in a long time.In the long term, only 24% of those polled expect Obama Care to improve their family’s healthcare situation: 

And finally, more of those polled expect that the legislation will make the national healthcare situation worse vs. those that think it will make it better:



Gallup’s summary of the latest results include the following conclusion, years after the legislation was put in place: “Americans as a whole remain more negative than positive about the Affordable Care Act and its impact on their lives and the national healthcare situation. Views of the ACA, however, are modestly more positive than they were last fall.Americans who are more likely to be affected by the ACA, including young people, lower-income groups and minorities, are at least slightly more likely than others to be positive about the impact of the ACA on their healthcare situations, although significant percentages of most of these groups still say the ACA has hurt them.”More negative than positive, kind of sums up the whole fiasco.2) We have often discussed the heavy burden via taxes, regulations, and requirements that Obama Care places on businesses. WE have shown a number of times and by any measurements that Obama Care is hurting economic growth, employment growth, and wage growth. A classic example of the burden was written up at an individual American businessman’s level in a recent Heritage Foundation article:

• Four years ago Scott Womack owned a dozen IHOP restaurants in Indiana.
• Back then he had testified in front of Congress on the likely negative impacts on his businesses due to Obama Care.
• At that time he employed about 1,000 people in his Indiana IHOPs and he had arrangements to open 14 new ones in Ohio.
• He was able to expand because of the profits he had made and was making on his Indiana IHOPs.
• However, Obama Care’s expected and mandated additional costs on his businesses would come out to about $7,000 per employee per year, endangering his expansion plans and endangering his overall profitability.
• All which left him with three unattractive options: cut costs, eliminate staff, reduce hours or convert workers to part-time status since like most restaurants his bottom line profit margin usually ran only between 5% and 7%.
• Four years after his Congressional testimony, he has had to sell his Indiana restaurants to another corporation and never did open the additional 14 restaurants in Ohio. easily not creating over 1,000 new jobs in that state’s economy.
• He stayed in the industry by buying a set of existing Popeye’s fast food outlets that is much more part time worker intensive, sidestepping some of Obama Care’s mandates and costs.
• Nevertheless, according to the article, he did offer health insurance to even his part time employees of which virtually none took him up on since it was way too expensive, despite the promises that Obama Care would reduce the cost of health care insurance.
• As a result of increasing expense of covering employees, he is now only able to cover his employees and not their spouses, like he had done previously: “Insurance rates are through the roof. Every year we get handed a 30 percent to 40 percent increase. The only way we have to offset that is cutting our coverage way back. That’s happened every year since the law passed.”
• He is not alone in his dire assessment of what the legislation did to the restaurant industry. The International Franchise Association, which advocates on behalf of franchises, has also concluded the law is negatively impacting economic growth across America: “Rather than helping existing and aspiring franchise owners expand by adding jobs, locations and more hours for their employees who need them most,” said spokesman Matthew Haller, “the law’s arbitrary definition of ‘large employer’ and ‘full-time work week’ have contributed to the steady increase in part-time employment in America and have been a drag on new franchise business formation.”

There you have it from a business perspective:

• American dream and hard work building a business destroyed by a single piece of legislation.
• Health care insurance costs going up for business owners, the exact opposite of what the legislation was supposed to do.
• Economic and employment growth stunted meaning fewer people get the chance to work and earn a living, leaving them without both insurance and an occupation.

Worst piece of legislation EVER enacted.3) Staying in the food industry and how bad it has been because of Obama Care, consider another aspect of the law. Restaurants are now supposed to hang signs and provide information in their restaurants on the healthiness of their various meals so that customers can make informed decisions about healthy eating. Good idea in theory, horrible idea in practice. Consider some previous writing on this topic of nutrition signs we have in previous posts:- From our August 19, 2011 post: The saddest part of this whole story is that this component of Obama Care is unlikely to have any positive impact on America. Market research that was carried out on people who ate at similar restaurants New York City after the city implemented the same menu board requirement found that very few people noticed the caloric signs, even fewer people read the signs, and even fewer people, a very, very small percentage, changed their eating habits as a result of the signs.- From our January 22, 2013 post: A study by PMC, which is an archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institute of Health's National Library of Medicine, studied this problem a few years ago. The results of which were published in the American Journal of Public Health in May, 2009.The PMC research study involved the following methodology and findings:

• The study followed 4,311 patrons in 8 suburban and urban franchises of McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, and Au Bon Pain.
• Only 6 of the 4,311 study subjects looked at nutritional information, which included calorie content, fat, carbohydrates, and sodium levels.
• One couple out of 1,501 McDonald’s customers looked at the posted nutritional info, while only 3 people eyeballed a nutritional poster at Burger King.
• One woman looked at this information at Au Bon Pain before ordering, and none of the 657 who entered Starbucks seemed to care much about seeking calorie content stats.

Pretty damning real life experiences and how stupid posting nutritional signs are in restaurants. But that does not stop the political class or the Federal bureaucrats who are so out of touch with reality and life outside of the Beltway.But given this reality, consider what is happening in Dominoes restaurants where the Federal government is mandating that nutritional content signs be posted in every store even though we know from above no one ever reads them: 

• Depending on how you customize your order, the number of combinations is in the millions, making it impossible to put a sign up for all possible combinations.
• Dominos has had a calorie counter on its website for years which does allow customers to compute nutritional content of a custom order. However, that is not good enough for the Obama Care regulations, there has to be a physical sign in the restaurants.
• Given that 90% of Dominos orders come in by phone or Internet and are often delivered, the company estimates that less than 10% of its customers will ever see the sign or linger around to read it since if they do pick up their phone order they are in and out quickly. However, that is not good enough for the Obama Care regulations, there has to be a physical sign in the restaurants.
• The signs will eventually cost $2,000 for every store, resulting in an unnecessary business cost of about $10 million, money that could have been spent on raising salaries, improving the meals, improving service, reducing the price of meals, improving the stock price for shareholders but instead will be wasted on signs that no one were ever read or take action on.

Obama Care insanity, first class.4) One last Obama Care disaster for today, with the following realities brought to us by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO):

• The CBO estimates that over the next ten years it will cost the American taxpayer, via the Federal government, to provide inferior health care insurance to about $1.35 TRILLION to provide inferior health care insurance to between 24 and 27 million Americans via Obama Care.
• This comes out to a whopping $50,000 for every Obama Care insured person.
• Despite spending over a TRILLION dollars there will still be millions and millions of Americans still without healthcare insurance after ten years, well short of the President’s grand plan to get every American healthcare insurance.
• And after ten years, given the current legislation, the root causes of our high health care costs will still be unaddressed and still driving up costs.

Enough unfolding disasters for today. What did we learn today:

• Nutritional signs are expensive and useless.
• The cost of covering Americans is expensive and likely to get worse without getting millions of people coverage.
• The legislation is stunting economic growth, especially in the restaurant business.
• Years after passage, American still hold negative opinions about the whole disaster known as Obama Care.

More disasters tomorrow.