They Didn't Care

Well, guess what, not everyone likes Obama Care.

And here's why. Regulators will never tell you about the paralysis their rules invoke because they frankly don't give a damn. They want what they want. And if it's in your face, so be it the say. This was a program they had to know and just didn't care that it would single out older Americans and force them out of the job market. They didn't care. And they never will.
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What the media never explained to people, as they never do about employers, were all the regulations that sent small businesses spinning into chaos who now had to buy expensive tracking software and monitor all their employees or face huge fines.
 
First, we had to deal with the 9.5% "affordability" penalty, whereby an employee could never be forced to pay more than 9.5% of his gross earnings to health care costs.  That was revised slightly higher to 9.6% this fiscal year.  What it did was force employers to track an employee's wage every month to see if his earnings exceeded that artificial benchmark.  It left us scrambling constantly, discussing rate increase with our brokers as well as allocated hours to make sure we didn't screw it up.  The vigilance of such regulations was hugely demanding of our time.
In addition, and even more perversely, we were forced to offer "affordable" coverage to any employee working over 30 hours per week.  This forced us to begin looking at employees differently.  They were now all potential liabilities to the company, land mines that could go off any time, triggering a penalty.  So since our staff always had variable hours (not fixed), we were forced to track the part-time (less than 30 hours) versus full-time every month, and if any went over that amount, we had to immediately investigate why with each manager – who had to, in turn, talk to the employee who violated that arrangement.  The time spent with these discussions were commonplace and took us away from actually running our business.

Soon, the twenty-niner club was born out of necessity, and we had more part-time staff than full.  It created less loyalty in the workforce, higher turnover, and poorer morale.  Part-time employees had to find another part-time job elsewhere to get more hours.  It was absolutely foul.  Even more pernicious was the potential for ageism, since elderly employees had a higher premium and thus a higher cost to the company.  There was a natural in-built incentive to avoid hiring older employees due to a higher cost associated with them. 

Finally, the amount of time and money spent tracking, talking, monitoring, paying fines, and new taxes; filling out 1095 forms; and truly now being more of a health care company (thanks, Obama) that just happened to be in retail on the side just goes to illustrate how out of touch and callous Obama was, with a complete disregard for both individuals as well as employers in living their own lives.  And all for what, in the end?  To help breed dependency within the small percentage of folks who went to the exchanges and onto a subsidy so he could ingrain patronage and mine new votes from an increasingly dependent class?  

We have lost so much – not just as a company.  Our nation has wasted eight years with this vain and costly experiment in statist coercion.  It has stalled our economy and been hostile to hiring in general since now all you're doing is taking on new liabilities.  

americanthinker.com/articles/2016/11/obamacare_the_destroyer_how_it_has_hurt_small_business.