The real Obamacare hustle
by digby
Kevin Drum points out something that's going to be an ongoing problem for the Democrats and the government: all problems with health care are now going to be blamed on Obamacare. He cites this little example of the AOL CEO blaming Obamacare for the fact that they're changing their 401K matching fund policy to save themselves some expense and screw their employees:
In the CEO chair, let me give you an example of the decisions we have to make as a company: Obamacare is an additional $7.1 million expense for us as a company....As a CEO and Management Team, we had to decide "Do we pass the $7.1 million of Obamacare costs to our employees or do we try to eat as much of that as possible and cut other benefits?"
Kevin spells out the obvious:
The all-purpose punching bag gets the blame again. AOL's health care expenses went up this year, just as they have every year since the company was founded, but this time it's Obamacare's fault. Why? Well, why not? It's a mighty handy excuse, isn't it? And it certainly distracts everyone from the fact that AOL is shafting its employees even though it just announced its best results in a decade.
Yup. This isn't the only example. Even in my own personal life I had an acquaintance of mine insist that her employer provided insurance costs more because of Obamacare. This person is a Republican and would probably be convinced of that in any case. But she claims that her human resources representative told her this. Having dealt with corporate human resources people in my life, I can easily believe it.
The real jerks are the dishonest corporate CEOs and others who know better who are saying it to excuse screwing their employees. In fact it's downright unpatriotic.
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