Thursday, November 15, 2012

Consequences and Eddies

The fallout from the recently affirmed Not So Vaunted Health System© continues to build. And it's not just pizza, but a host of seemingly unrelated institutions.

FoIB Jeff M tips us to the recent announcement by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, which has recently axed almost 1,000 employees as a result of "the challenges of health-care reform, federal budget deficits and a decline in research funding from The National Institutes of Health and private industry.

But it's not just the Baptists. At the other end of the spectrum, "the Roman Catholic church will not comply with the Obama administration requirement that most employers provide health insurance covering birth control." This is in response to the convenience items birth control mandate handed down by HHS Secretary Shecantbeserious.

And the hits just keep on comin': Palm Beach, Florida restaurateur John Metz has come up with a novel way to unbundle the extra costs of the NSVHS©. He's planning to "charge his customers a five-percent surcharge and decrease his employees’ hours to offset the costs of Obamacare on his businesses."

That's really a two-fer: by specifically noting the extra charge, customers get a real-world intro to the extra costs the train-wreck imposes on business. And servers get to see the effects of these costs on their own lives, both in terms of fewer hours (and lower net pay) and, presumably, lower tips (and thus lower net pay) as customers decide how much that service is worth versus the surcharge.

Talk about a Grand Slam.
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