We Have Choices

I've been seeing a lot since President Obama was re-elected that those wonderful "job creators" are whining about complying with the Affordable Care Act. Apparently some business owners don't believe in the concept of providing their employees with access to health insurance.  Obviously, having healthy employees is beneficial to businesses--especially businesses that deal with preparing and serving food to the public, but some business owners are bent on using the ACA as the means to exact revenge for President Obama's re-election.  Let's look at a disgruntled conservative.

John Schnatter, owner of Papa John's Pizza has been one of the loudest whiners when it comes to Obamacare.  He's stated loudly to anyone who would listen that he would have to raise the price on his pizza to cover the cost of healthcare for his employees.  A visit to his website shows that there are many "benefits" offered to Papa John's employees,  Full-time, salaried employees are offered health insurance, dental insurance, vision coverage as well as flex accounts, health savings accounts, accidental death and dismemberment insurance among other things, like a 401k.  

Part-time employees (everyone but the store manager) are offered direct deposit, pizza discounts, training and a weekly paycheck (wow--that's a benefit?!)along with something called "Papa's Perks" (I don't even want to know what that is).  Despite all this being listed on his website, Papa says Obamacare will add 14 cents to the price of a pizza.  While researching this piece, I learned that the average mark up on a pizza at Papa's is 70%.  I also learned that the cost of healthcare for employees is a tax write-off.  So Schnatter is using healthcare as an excuse to increase his profit margin and get revenge on those who voted for Obama.  John Schnatter is worth an estimated $300 million dollars and lives here:

Yep, the whole thing is his "house".  It even has an underground parking garage.  Yet he's worried about the price of healthcare for his employees.  He'd rather they have to apply for Medicaid, as in-store employees are paid minimum wage (In New York, that's $7.25 an hour).  In short, he'd rather the tax payers foot the bill for his employees insurance so he can afford his 

super-cool mansion.  For the record, Papa John's employs approximately 16,500 people.  That's a lot of medicaid.  

Let's get down to the truth of the matter.  Business owners like John Schnatter don't care about their employees.  They care about maximizing their profit margin above all else.  With a 70% mark-up on their product, Papa John's can more than afford the cost of providing decent healthcare for their employees, but they're unwilling to sacrifice that tiny little bit of profit.  Wait--strike that--the ACA makes it even more affordable for them to provide healthcare and they are even able to write the cost off on their taxes.  So the bottom line is that it's strictly revenge for Obama's re-election.  

The thing we must remember as consumers is that we are the job creators.  When we buy a product from a business, and give them our money, it creates demand for that product.  Increased demand creates the need for more employees.  It puts more money in the business owners pockets.  It creates demand for other businesses, as that business owner must buy more product to create his product.  So--we buy more pizza, and Papa orders more cheese, more sauce and more pizza boxes to put them in.  He hires more counter people to make those pizzas, and more drivers to deliver them to us.  Papa makes more money so he can hire another architect and construction crew to build himself another ridiculously huge house.  The economy flourishes.  But Papa doesn't want to play fair with his workers.

I suggest we stimulate the economy by patronizing businesses where the owners care about their workers, about their customers, their community and about their country.  That's the really cool thing about America.  We have lots of choices.  Besides, it's been my experience that the local pizza joint on the corner makes a much better pizza than Papa John.  His pizza sucked long before I found out that he did as well.