Indiana resident Scott Womack understands the effects of Obamacare on small-business better than most. As the owner of 12 IHOP restaurants in Indiana and Ohio, Womack employs nearly 1,000 full- and part-time employees and he already offers health insurance to his management staff.
The Heritage Foundation recently interviewed Womack for the latest installment of our “Impact of Obamacare” series and found what he had to say further evidence that the law won’t fix the problems it’s supposed to solve–but, instead, will create new ones.
Take just one example. The new health care law will require him to provide insurance to all full-time employees beginning in 2014. Womack would like to be able to do that–but he simply doesn’t know how he’ll be able to generate the revenue. He estimates the cost of the law to his company to be 50 percent greater than his company’s earnings–in other words, beyond his ability to pay. That means Womack will have to make other changes to compensate for his increased costs–changes that might affect the number and quality of jobs he’s able to offer.
“If the health care reform law is not repealed or if the employer mandate doesn’t go away, we’re going to have to take drastic action to trim employees’ hours back, to manage those numbers down, trim services,” Womack explains. “We’ll have to take a look at cutting a lot of things that we pay for now or that we do to make room for this.”
That’s why–on the anniversary of Obamacare–Womack’s keeping his fingers crossed that the law will ultimately be repealed. He’s not alone. A year later, 53 percent of likely voters still favor repeal, according to a March 21 poll by Rasmussen Reports.