# White Castle gross cut in half by Obamacare? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 13, 2010, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055 "2010-06-13T22:49:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/61 "2010-06-15T17:29:15Z")
> [@Dick\_Dastardly](#): > > The Heritage Foundation, your source of knowledge and posts on this board, I rarely use the Heritage foundation. I don’t read their website regularly. > [@](#): > > actually proposed a health plan very very similar to Obamacare a few years ago. Don’t you think it’s a little bit hypocritical for Heritage/you to be criticising the same thing they were advocating a few years ago? What a bizarre argument. So, because I advocate free-market proposals, I’m therefore someone who must agree with the Heritage Foundation on everything. Is that right? And since the Heritage Foundation apparently proposed something like this in the past (which I never read, and knew nothing about), I’m therefore a hypocrite by association or something? Truly lame. And again, you ignore the actual substance of the argument and go for the personal attack. Why am I not surprised? > [@](#): > > And surely there must be a better talking point for you on their website than “healthcare costs are affecting hiring”? You don’t think hiring is lousy due to the fact we just went through the biggest financial meltdown in history and companies currently with massive excess capacity are waiting for demand to pick up before they hire anybody new? Surely the Heritage Foundation/you can do better than this? Again, aside from your lame insinuations and attempts to marginalize my position through ad-hominem attacks, your actual argument is incredibly weak. What, do you think that the fact that there’s a recession means that businesses don’t care about cost uncertainty? You’ve got it exactly backwards. It’s precisely when demand is down and businesses are hurting that they become extremely cautious and seek to minimize risk. In any event, your argument assumes that the lack of hiring is solely due to a lack of demand. Where’s your evidence for that? How come private sector hiring almost always comes in below analyst and economist expectations these days? They can measure demand. They can track the flow of goods and money. But they keep getting surprised that business hiring is lagging. I think a lot of you who dismiss things like uncertainty and business costs have never run a business. I have. I had a small business for ten years. And let me tell you, hiring someone is _scary_ when you have a business with one or two employees. It’s a major cost. You often have to take at least some of the cost out of your own salary. For the smallest of businesses, not knowing whether you’re going to have to pay an additional $3,000 or more per year for each employee can easily make the difference between hiring and not hiring. Even more worrying is the uncertainty around regulations, reporting, accounting, and other roadblocks the government can throw in your path. Obamacare is a huge program, and no one quite knows exactly how it’s going to shake out once the bureaucracy gets through coming up with all the details. Businesses don’t know how it’s going to affect their competitors or their own bottom line. It’s a significant source of uncertainty, added onto the economy at a time when uncertainty is already at an all-time high. Add in the other promises Obama is making that will put more burden on businesses (Cap and Trade, EPA CO2 regulation, new promised financial regulations, stimulus plans, the skyrocketing debt, yada yada), and his form of activist government could be doing a lot of damage to the economy right now. If you want to do all this stuff, you should do it at a time when confidence is high and the economy is humming along well. Throwing all this crap around during a recession is just a very bad idea. By the way, Canada, with 1/10 the population of the U.S., created almost as many private sector jobs last month as were created in the entire U.S. At some point, you can’t just blame a worldwide recession - not if your recovery is lagging everyone else’s. ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/62 "2010-06-15T17:50:24Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > I rarely use the Heritage foundation. I don’t read their website regularly. > > What a bizarre argument. So, because I advocate free-market proposals, I’m therefore someone who must agree with the Heritage Foundation on everything. Is that right? And since the Heritage Foundation apparently proposed something like this in the past (which I never read, and knew nothing about), I’m therefore a hypocrite by association or something? > > Truly lame. And again, you ignore the actual substance of the argument and go for the personal attack. Why am I not surprised? > > Again, aside from your lame insinuations and attempts to marginalize my position through ad-hominem attacks, your actual argument is incredibly weak. What, do you think that the fact that there’s a recession means that businesses don’t care about cost uncertainty? You’ve got it exactly backwards. It’s precisely when demand is down and businesses are hurting that they become extremely cautious and seek to minimize risk. > > In any event, your argument assumes that the lack of hiring is solely due to a lack of demand. Where’s your evidence for that? How come private sector hiring almost always comes in below analyst and economist expectations these days? They can measure demand. They can track the flow of goods and money. But they keep getting surprised that business hiring is lagging. > > I think a lot of you who dismiss things like uncertainty and business costs have never run a business. I have. I had a small business for ten years. And let me tell you, hiring someone is _scary_ when you have a business with one or two employees. It’s a major cost. You often have to take at least some of the cost out of your own salary. > > For the smallest of businesses, not knowing whether you’re going to have to pay an additional $3,000 or more per year for each employee can easily make the difference between hiring and not hiring. Even more worrying is the uncertainty around regulations, reporting, accounting, and other roadblocks the government can throw in your path. > > Obamacare is a huge program, and no one quite knows exactly how it’s going to shake out once the bureaucracy gets through coming up with all the details. Businesses don’t know how it’s going to affect their competitors or their own bottom line. It’s a significant source of uncertainty, added onto the economy at a time when uncertainty is already at an all-time high. > > Add in the other promises Obama is making that will put more burden on businesses (Cap and Trade, EPA CO2 regulation, new promised financial regulations, stimulus plans, the skyrocketing debt, yada yada), and his form of activist government could be doing a lot of damage to the economy right now. > > If you want to do all this stuff, you should do it at a time when confidence is high and the economy is humming along well. Throwing all this crap around during a recession is just a very bad idea. > > By the way, Canada, with 1/10 the population of the U.S., created almost as many private sector jobs last month as were created in the entire U.S. At some point, you can’t just blame a worldwide recession - not if your recovery is lagging everyone else’s. All you do is parrot Heritage talking points and you raid their website and pass their bs claims off as your own words in your posts, the most outstanding recent example of which can be found here [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12561522&postcount=84](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12561522&postcount=84) in which you parrot bs claims that only the Heritage Foundation are making that there were more job losses in the 2001 recession and paste many other nonsense and bs claims/talking points direct from Heritage in that post and subsequent posts in the thread. The stuff you posted in this thread is just standard Heritage/other conservative nutjob think tanks’ talking points. Nobody is hiring because there’s no reason to hire, businesses have massive excess capacity and there’s no demand increases to require them to hire more people. If demand picked up massively tomorrow then businesses would start hiring again and the “uncertainty” that some cap-and-trade bill that might pass in a year or two and take effect only years after will have exactly zero beraring on hiring. After all, this is America, should the jackboot of regulation make those new hires unprofitable at some point years in the future then they can simply be fired, no worker protections for them! And the stuff about Canada is just silly. Canada have a universal healthcare system and they’re hiring more people, so are you saying the US should scrap Obamacare and set up a universal system? Or are you as usual making a dishonest apples to oranges comparison of a US economy devastated by a financial meltdown created in America where most of the effects were felt and comparing it to Canada, a country that was relatively untouched by the meltdown, where businesses have good access to credit unlike their American counterparts, etc. etc.? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/63 "2010-06-15T19:07:11Z")
> [@BlinkingDuck](#): > > As a future post pointed out - I was misunderstood. > > WC’s health costs for each rank and file worker was probably zero…because they probably don’t offer it and, if they do, it is unaffordable to them. At minimum wage, $10 a month is probably unaffordable. > > I am sick and tired of these shitass companies bitching and whining because they have to start paying more (not all) of the real costs of their employees. If you have workers and you don’t offer them affordable health insurance, you should be taken out in the street and shot. My sentiments exactly. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/64 "2010-06-15T19:15:24Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Company A offers an employee a salary of $39,000 dollars. > > Company B offers the same employee $30,000, plus a $9,000 health care plan. > > In both cases, the employee compensation is identical. Both are perfectly legitimate choices as to how to offer compensation to employees. Both are equally fair. > > Now along comes Obamacare, and says that Company A must provide health insurance to all its employees. But they’re already being compensated for the lack of health insurance. However, under the logic of the new health care plan, this doesn’t matter. Might I trouble you for a cite as to the actual salary increment for companies not offering health care benefits? A 30% increment, as in your example, seems rather high to me. Since, as you say, salaries are sticky, and since I suspect few people getting $30K a year jobs are going to be able to research the value of the health benefits to them, I’d guess that the actual salary offered by company A is a lot lower, since they would be able to compete for employees by offering, say, $2k more. (My number is as big a guess as yours until we see some cites.) If the salary increment is lower than the actual cost of health care for the employee, then the situation changes. Don’t forget that large employees anyhow can negotiate better prices than individuals, though the new system will help that to some extent. Please also factor in the benefit that employer paid plans do not reject people for pre-existing conditions, do not drop people when they get sick, and, in my experience anyhow, give you a lot less hassle than Dopers who have individual plans seem to face. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/65 "2010-06-15T19:18:53Z")
> [@Dick\_Dastardly](#): > > All you do is parrot Heritage talking points and you raid their website and pass their bs claims off as your own words in your posts, the most outstanding recent example of which can be found here > > [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12561522&postcount=84](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12561522&postcount=84) > > in which you parrot bs claims that only the Heritage Foundation are making that there were more job losses in the 2001 recession and paste many other nonsense and bs claims/talking points direct from Heritage in that post and subsequent posts in the thread. > The stuff you posted in this thread is just standard Heritage/other conservative nutjob think tanks’ talking points. Nobody is hiring because there’s no reason to hire, businesses have massive excess capacity and there’s no demand increases to require them to hire more people. If demand picked up massively tomorrow then businesses would start hiring again and the “uncertainty” that some cap-and-trade bill that might pass in a year or two and take effect only years after will have exactly zero beraring on hiring. After all, this is America, should the jackboot of regulation make those new hires unprofitable at some point years in the future then they can simply be fired, no worker protections for them! > And the stuff about Canada is just silly. Canada have a universal healthcare system and they’re hiring more people, so are you saying the US should scrap Obamacare and set up a universal system? Or are you as usual making a dishonest apples to oranges comparison of a US economy devastated by a financial meltdown created in America where most of the effects were felt and comparing it to Canada, a country that was relatively untouched by the meltdown, where businesses have good access to credit unlike their American counterparts, etc. etc.? So all you’ve got is more ad-hominem. Come back when you’ve got a real argument. And when you can learn to stop misrepresenting my positions and making assumptions about where I get my information. And most importantly, when you can learn how to debate ideas without attacking the people or organizations behind them. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2010, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/66 "2010-06-15T21:02:52Z")
> [@Dick\_Dastardly](#): > > And the stuff about Canada is just silly. Canada have a universal healthcare system and they’re hiring more people, so are you saying the US should scrap Obamacare and set up a universal system? While our system isn’t perfect, that’s actually not a bad idea. Politically impossible, perhaps, but from what I can tell of Obamacare, it’d work better. Actually, the USA already has a similar (not exactly the same, but similar) system: Medicare. The main problem with it is that it’s restricted to fogeys. ---
**Author:** ![Stan\_Shmenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/94ad74/32.png) [@Stan\_Shmenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stan_Shmenge)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2010, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/67 "2010-06-16T00:03:25Z")
> [@Magiver](#): > > Or maybe they could make the food in Mexico. [This site](http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/785281/white_castle_burgers_review_frozen.html?cat=22) rates the frozen ones better than the food outlet. Heresy. ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2010, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/68 "2010-06-16T00:13:19Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > So all you’ve got is more ad-hominem. Come back when you’ve got a real argument. And when you can learn to stop misrepresenting my positions and making assumptions about where I get my information. And most importantly, when you can learn how to debate ideas without attacking the people or organizations behind them. Come back with a real argument? That’s a sidesplitter coming from somebody who cuts and pastes his posts from right wing think tanks and then refuses to admit it. I thought it was Americans who don’t do irony? You got your ridiculous bs claim that more jobs were lost a year and a half into the 2001 recession than the current one direct from the Heritage Foundation. I read your claim and thought that’s ridiculous even for Sam, where did he get that rubbish from? So I highlighted “more jobs were shed in the 2001 recession than were shed in the current recession”, right clicked it and googled it. Sure enough, the sixth hit comes from the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage article you got that nonsense from also contains all the garbage boilerplate about business uncertainty about new taxes, legislation etc. that you used in your argument in that thread and in this one. The Heritage post even advises that the Bacon-Davis act should be repealed, something you parroted verbatim in a subsequent post in the other thread. I invite our fellow forumers to compare your posts and the Heritage post and decide for themselves on this one. And if you’re still going to claim in the face of all the evidence that you didn’t just rip that post off then can you come up with a cite for your ridiculous claim that more jobs were shed in the 2001 recession than this one? Or did you just make that up out of thin air? Here’s the non-Heritage reality : [![](https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/job-losses-3-recessions.png) ](https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/job-losses-3-recessions.png) ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2010, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/69 "2010-06-16T02:02:18Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Company A offers an employee a salary of $39,000 dollars. > > Company B offers the same employee $30,000, plus a $9,000 health care plan. > > In both cases, the employee compensation is identical. Both are perfectly legitimate choices as to how to offer compensation to employees. Both are equally fair. > > . Except these are completely bogus numbers made up out of whole cloth. No company would offer a 30K employee a 9K health plan. Nor does the company commonly tell the employee the price of the health plan offered. Finally, if a company is offering it’s employees health benefits that would cost the employees each $9000 if bought themselves, it costs the company far less, due to the value of buying insurance in bulk- which means that low and high risk employees are covered. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2010, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/70 "2010-06-16T13:20:32Z")
> [@](#): > > if a company is offering it’s employees health benefits that would cost the employees each $9000 if bought themselves, it costs the company far less, due to the value of buying insurance in bulk- which means that low and high risk employees are covered. Do you have a cite for this, please? Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2010, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/71 "2010-06-16T17:15:35Z")
No “cite” but it’s correct, and for two reasons. 1) the “retention” (i.e. the portion not spent on claims) on individual (& even small group) policies is much higher than for large groups. And 2) because anti-selection is extremely high for individuals and even for small groups. So actual claims (per capita) are lower for large groups as well. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2010, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/72 "2010-06-16T19:14:51Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I’m not disputing that this will cost them more money. I’m saying that the money it will cost them is money they are making by dumping reasonable costs of doing business on the public at large. Thus charging them this extra money is not causing inequity (to their stockholders) but restoring a level playing field. Isn’t it fair that WC customers pay the actual cost of producing a burger? You are making the assumption that providing health care to the hamburger-flipping employee is a reasonable cost of doing business. Throughout my lifetime this type of job was offered to a 16 year old kid for meager wages who got health care from his parents. That is the TRUE cost of the employee making the burger. Now, it’s unfortunate that a 40 year old might have to work there (because he cannot find other employment) but the fact that he cannot pay for his healthcare because of his meager job is not the fault of the fast food joint, nor does it change the market labor cost of producing a hamburger: the wages of a 16 year old kid. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2010, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055/73 "2010-06-17T02:47:43Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > Do you have a cite for this, please? Are you honestly asking for a cite that sez group rate health insurance is cheaper than if purchased by a individual? Really? :dubious: Ok, here’s one of the first million of so hits: [http://www.healthplanone.com/smallbusiness.asp](http://www.healthplanone.com/smallbusiness.asp) 6. _Cheaper group rates. In New York, group rate health insurance is much less expensive than individual health insurance. These differences in rates may also be similar for other states making group and small business health insurance more affordable._ and here: > **[Smart Money](https://www.dowjones.com/company/resources/smart-money/)** > > Dow Jones Smart Money is your resource for creating a better financial future. For any age, any experience level, any goal—start building financial knowledge today with smart insights and trusted experience from Dow Jones money experts. \*And since group coverage tends to be cheaper, don’t forget to check with your professional trade association for coverage. \* and here: [http://ezinearticles.com/?Pros-and-Cons-of-Getting-Group-Health-Insurance-Vs-Individual-Health-Insurance&id=4461584](http://ezinearticles.com/?Pros-and-Cons-of-Getting-Group-Health-Insurance-Vs-Individual-Health-Insurance&id=4461584) _Group health cover is insurance obtained through an individual’s employer and rates are usually much more affordable because a group of people is being insured rather than just one individual._ Of course, if you happen to be a perfect non-risk, YMMV. I guess, next you’ll ask for a cite that the Sun rises in the West.:rolleyes: [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/white-castle-gross-cut-in-half-by-obamacare/543055.md?page=3)