It’s not like we weren’t warned in advance.  How many companies said that if Obama won re-election that they would be forced to cut their workforce to pay for Obmacare and all the new taxes that would be imposed on their businesses?  So, it can’t come as a shock to anyone that one company after another has begun letting go of their employees with lightening speed in the week since the election.  Sadly, the companies can’t designate the layoffs to just those who voted for Obama, so here we are once again, many of us paying for someone else’s mistakes.

Let’s start with the medical equipment tax that is buried in Obamacare that is now going to cost thousands of jobs.

Welch Allyn, who manufactures diagnostic equipment announced that they will lay off 275 employees,  which equates to 10% of their workforce.  They have specifically named the new medical equipment tax as their primary reason for the job eliminations.

Stryker, One of the biggest medical device manufacturers in the world, will close their facility in Orchard Park, New York, eliminating 96 jobs in December. Worse, they plan on countering the medical device tax in Obamacare by slashing 5% of their global workforce – an estimated 1,170 positions.

Boston Scientific announced that the company would be cutting anywhere between 1,200 and 1,400 jobs, while simultaneously shifting investments and workers overseas – to China.

Medtronic, cut 500 positions over the summer, with another 500 set for the end of 2013. The layoffs have been credited directly to Obamacare.

Those layoffs are due to the tax on medical equipment, but many many other companies are laying off and cutting back hours due to the new rules under the Affordable Care Act.  Any employer with over 50 employees must provide health insurance to full time employees or pay a $2,000 fine for each employee. For this reason, Applebees and Darden Restaurants have chosen to slash hours and cut back their workforce.  If all of a restaurant’s profits are eaten up by fines and increased health insurance costs, what do we expect them to do, operate at a loss?  Of course judging by some of the comments I’ve seen regarding this story on liberal web-sites, that is exactly what the liberal logic says.

Kroger Foods, who employs approximately 350,000 people, will begin limiting hours of their part time employees to 28.  Currently, Kroger’s non-exempt employees can work as many hours as they need to, but that will all change beginning in January.  New hires will also be subject to the same limited hours.

This is obviously not a complete list of all the companies that will cut jobs and/or hours. It is rather,­­ a small sampling of what we have to look forward to due to the short sightedness of this country’s choice to re-elect Barack Obama and thereby giving up any chance of repealing this monstrosity of a job killing law.

A JP Morgan economist “points out that 8.3 million people are working in part-time jobs even though they’d prefer full-time work. Unfortunately, because of President Obama’s health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), workers in the hotel, restaurant, and retail industries could be pushed into part-time jobs working less than 30 hours per week.”

“Under the health care law, if a company has more than 50 “full time equivalent” workers, a combination of full and part-time employees, but doesn’t offer “affordable” coverage that meets the government’s minimum value standard, the company will have to pay a penalty. This penalty is determined by the number of full-time employees minus 30 full-time employees. So to reiterate a very important point: part-time workers are not part of the penalty formula. The health care law creates a perverse incentive to hire part-time versus full-time workers.”

Again, I have to point out that we have done this to ourselves!  We have shot ourselves in the foot by re-electing Obama.  I know I’ll get all kinds of comments from angry readers again who will tell me that they themselves did not vote for him and not to blame them, but as nation, we certainly did!  Whether he won by voter fraud or by real numbers, we have to accept that as a nation, we have allowed ourselves to get to this point through our complacency over the past several years and this entitlement mentality that has become so pervasive in this country.

I’m the last person to say that we didn’t need some kind of healthcare reform, but this was not the way to do it.  I have a friend who worked for many years and always had healthcare.  A few years ago, he lost his job and couldn’t find another one.  Sadly, he found out that he had cancer and needed immediate treatment.  Without health insurance, the cost of his treatment will have to come out of his own pocket.  I remember seeing a post on his page wondering why people didn’t want him to have health insurance.  It broke my heart for several reasons.  He is my friend and I want him to be healthy and get the best care possible.  It also hurt me to think that he believes that because we are opposed to Obamacare that we don’t want people to have insurance, and mostly because he will never understand that it’s about this specific law and not about a lack of empathy for his plight.  I believe that if people need or want health insurance, it should be available to them.  However, there has to be a better way to make sure my friend has proper healthcare without it costing tens of thousands of people their livelihoods.

Shoving through this law that nobody read is on Congress, re-electing the very people who did this to us is on us.  In fact, the democrats gained seats in the Senate.  Please someone explain that to me.

I initially predicted that we would have 10% unemployment within two years.  I would now like to amend that prediction.  I now believe that we will see that number by March of 2013.  I can’t imagine how Obama will pull us out of this disaster he’s created, but at least he won’t be able to blame it on Bush anymore.

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