Rather than serve as a cure-all for a broken health care system, Obamacare will be a harbinger of death, says Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus. The death of main street, that is.
Rising costs from providing expanded health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act will be too much to bear for mom and pop operations, Marcus told Newsmax TV Thursday at a summit for Job Creators Alliance, a group he established after retiring from and severing ties with Home Depot in 2002.
“Obamacare is going to kill off small business,” Marcus said, while simultanesouly criticizing other forms of government regulation, such as Dodd-Frank and the Environmental Protection Agency. Such programs, he argues, only stand in the way of small business growth.
“Obamacare is the capper. That’s the bullet to the temple,” he added.
Marcus, who supported Romney in last year’s election, has been a sharp critic of President Obama’s approach to business in the past. But he’s not alone in voicing concern about Obamacare.
Some small business owners say that abiding by Obama's health care reform law, which requires businesses with 50 or more full-time workers to provide health care coverage for employees, is simply too costly. According to the Wall Street Journal, an increasing number of companies are electing to pay a fee to break the law, claiming that this would be less costly than abiding by Obamacare.
Others claim they’ll be forced to lay off workers because of new costs associated with the law.
But not everyone is convinced Obamacare will be so bad for small business. It’s estimated that businesses with fewer than 100 employees can actually expect costs to decline under the new law, according to an October 2012 study by the Urban Institute.
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