Ed Butowsky, Managing Partner of Chapwood Investment Management, appears live on Varney & Company to discuss how Corporate America views the Obama health care reform bill.
One of Obama’s claim to fame for this administration is the health care reform bill past earlier this year. With all the changes and reforms geared towards the employees and consumers, not a lot of thought was put into how this would impact corporations large and small. The impact of this “fire drill health care” is back firing as companies are deciding whether to offer healthcare or not. A McDonald’s memo was leaked saying that it was going to withdraw healthcare for 30,000 employees. The White House was quick to reply to such activities that it would be flexible with McDonald’s and other companies. This goes against the health care bill, which once passed became a law in this country.
Ed Butowsky explains very crisply that this is a terrible bill. Ed further explains that when this bill came out every company examined the impact of this bill. The bottom line is that businesses (with over 50 employees) that do not provide insurance will be fined $2,000 per employee. It is quite apparent that the costs in general for health care are going to be significantly higher per employee, that many companies are contemplating paying the fine which is much less then what they would be paying for insurance. Surely this is not what the bill was intending to do.
The real problem that Ed and others on the panel point out is that while the judicial branch of our government is in place to interpret the law, the executive branch has taken it upon themselves to do the same and tweak the bill to accommodate companies like McDonald’s who complain about the costs. This could mean that companies that employ 1.4 million low wage employees like Aetna, CVS, Kmart, and Home Depot would be given a waiver for not providing insurance. Moreover Ed Butowsky, who manages a company and wishes he could higher more people but health care is a major deterrent, and others like him have a hard time gaining clarity on the costs that are associated with this bill other than it could be significantly higher than it is now.
Overall, Ed agrees if we could replace this terrible bill with one that was more consumer and company friendly it would be a huge plus for the economy and for the stock market.
Key Health Care Reform Drivers:
- Extend health care coverage to the 45+ million people without any insurance for one reason or another.
- Take care of insurance company abuse. Since 1970 Insurance companies have shifted from providing security to becoming good risk differentiators. Medical bills is one of the top bankruptcy reasons in our country.
- Ensure Insurance plans are more effective to the person and spent more on the person’s health care costs and less on the insurance company overhead.
- Deficit reduction. By enacting this reform its estimated that the bill could help reduce the deficit in 10 years by as much as $138 billion.
Tags: bankruptcy, fox business, health care, mcdonald's, obamacare
