President Obama says his health care “reform” will be good for
business.

Business has learned the truth.

Three successful businessmen came on my Fox
Business show last week to explain how Obamacare is a reason
that unemployment stays high. Its length and complexity make
businessmen wary of expanding.

Mike Whalen, CEO of Heart of America Group, which runs hotels
and restaurants, said that when he asked his company’s health
insurance experts to summarize the impact of Obamacare, “the three
of them kind of looked at each other and said, ‘We’ve gone to
seminar after seminar, and, Mike, we can’t tell you.’ I think that
just kind of sums up the uncertainty.”

Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, added that Obamacare makes it
impossible to achieve even basic certainty about future personnel
costs:

“If I was trying to get you to fund a new business I had started
and you asked me what my payroll was going to be three years from
now per employee, if I went to the deepest specialist in the
industry, he can’t tell me what it’s actually going to cost, let
alone what I’m going to be responsible for.”

You would think a piece of legislation more than a thousand
pages long would at least be clear about the specifics. But a lot
of those pages say: “The secretary will determine …” That means
the secretary of Health and Human Services will announce the rules
sometime in the future. How can a business make plans in such a
fog?

John Allison, former CEO of BBT, the 12th biggest bank in
America, pointed out how Obamacare encourages employers not to
insure their employees. Under the law, an employer would be fined
for that. But the penalty at present—about $2,000—is lower than the
cost of a policy.

“What that means is in theory every company ought to dump their
plan on the government plan and pay the penalty,” he said. “So you
don’t really know what the cost is because it’s designed to
fail.”

Of course, then every employee would turn to the
government-subsidized health insurance. Maybe that was the central
planners’ intention all along.

An owner of 12 IHOPS told me that he can’t expand his business
because he can’t afford the burden of Obamacare. Many of his
waitresses work part time or change jobs every few months. He
hadn’t been insuring them, but Obamacare requires him to. He says
he can’t make money paying a $2,000 penalty for every waitress, so
he’s cancelled his plans to expand. It’s one more reason why job
growth hasn’t picked up post-recession.

Of course, we were told that government health care would
increase hiring. After all, European companies don’t have to pay
for their employees’ health insurance. If every American employer
paid the $2,000 penalty and their workers turned to government for
insurance, American companies would be better able to compete with
European ones. They might save $10,000 per employee.

That sounded good, but like so many politicians’ promises, it
leaves out the hidden costs. When countries move to a
government-funded system, taxes rise to crushing levels, as they
have in Europe.

Whalen sees Obamacare as a crossing of the Rubicon.

“We’ve had an agreement in this country, kind of unwritten, for
the last 50 years, that we would spend about 18 to 19 percent of
GDP (gross domestic product) on the federal government. This is a
tipping point. This takes us to 25 to 30 percent. And that money
comes out of the private sector. That means fewer jobs. This is a
game-changer.”

He means it’s a game-changer because of the cost. But the law’s
impenetrable complication does almost as much damage. Robert Higgs
of the Independent Institute is right: If you wonder why
businesspeople are not investing and reviving the economy, the
answer lies in all the question marks that Obamacare and other new
regulations confront them with. Higgs calls this “regime
uncertainty.”
It’s also what prolonged the Great Depression.

No one who understands the nature of government as the wielder
of force—as opposed to the peaceful persuasion of the free
market—is surprised by this.