[caption id=”attachment_103411″ align=”aligncenter” width=”605″](Associated Press)
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Five years ago this week, President Obama signed his broken healthcare proposal into law. At the time, I was a nurse working long hours and late nights with my husband at our small practice in Dunn, North Carolina. Fast forward five years later, and this unworkable law has neither cut costs nor improved the quality of or access to healthcare. In short, it is just as big of a costly disaster as I knew it would be when President Obama first proposed it.
Since this government takeover of our nation’s healthcare system, the price tag of this law has reached nearly $1.2 trillion dollars. Many young adults — who rarely visit a doctor — have been forced to purchase a health plan many didn’t want or need. To add insult to injury, this law was designed to siphon money from younger populations in order to foot its cost. This law needs young and healthy adults to pay the astronomically-high premiums — or the subsequent tax penalties — in order for the system to work.
I wish I could say that was the worst of it, but there are always more surprises with Obamacare — after all, we had to pass it to see what was in it. The “employer mandate” is yet another directive from the Obama administration that has hit the pockets of middle-class Americans and encouraged employers to cut the hours of full-time employees.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank, the employer mandate has led one in five companies to reduce employee hours from full-time to part-time statuses in order to avoid penalties and fines. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the employer mandate will cost American companies $139 billion in fines over the course of the next 10 years. To clarify, that is $139 billion that could have been used to hire recent college graduates, raise salaries or provide bonuses to those in the workforce.
In redefining the number of full-time work from 40 hours per week to 30 hours per week, the Obama administration is curbing economic opportunity for young adults, recent college graduates, low income workers and women in particular. Students who work their way through college in order to lessen the sting of rising tuition or book costs are now at risk for having their wages and hours cut. Recent college graduates now face fewer opportunities in the workforce, as small businesses have placed a hold on hiring or may be doing so with stipulations as to the number of hours and pay that can be provided.
While the president may not acknowledge the consequences of his inefficient healthcare law, we in Congress have — and we have rolled out a bicameral legislative blueprint for replacing it called the Patient CARE Act. This plan directly contrasts Obamacare and its evolving list of government-centered mandates and regulations that are so badly stifling business and hurting patients. Instead, it offers an affordable, patient-centered alternative that proves to the American people we are making their priorities our own.
