ObamaCare Job-Killing Spree Continues

ObamaCare Job-Killing Spree Continues
Another 43,000 good jobs are going down the tubes.
by John Hayward
11/17/2011

The greatest job-killing force unleashed on the American economy since the Great Depression​, ObamaCare, is poised to knock off another 10% of the medical device workforce, as reported by the Daily Caller:

The 2010 law imposed a crippling 10-year, $20 billion tax on revenues — not on profits — earned by companies that make medical devices, such as catheters, artery-clearing stents, scalpels and pacemakers.

The tax is prompting American companies to shed jobs, move factories overseas and reconsider niche-market research projects, said Paulson, whose district include medical device companies.

No Senate Democrats are supporting his tax-repeal bill, even though many have medical devices companies in their districts, he said. “They’re the ones digging to protect Obamacare,” he told The Daily Caller.

“The administration will dig in and protect Obamacare at all costs, even if it looks like it is going to cause the layoff of 10 percent of the medical-device workforce, or 43,000 jobs,” said Paulson, who has gathered 218 House signatures for a bill to repeal the tax.

The pessimistic forecast is echoed by Kem Hawkins, president of Cook Medical​, a family-owned firm in Bloomington, Ind., that employs 10,000 workers, most of them in the United States.

“Companies are already moving jobs, they’re already moving products, they’re not investing in the U.S.,” he told The DC. “If we don’t stop it now … it will be too late” to preserve the United States’ leading role, he said.

Hawkins, incidentally, worries that speaking out may put his company in “harms way” with vengeful Obama Administration regulatory agencies. I wonder if he owns a Gibson guitar.

Obama could defend himself by noting that 43,000 jobs is nothing for ObamaCare. It annihilated at least that many jobs within a few months of its passage, from companies like Medtronic, Caterpillar, John Deere, and Sallie Mae​. The latter butchery of 2,500 jobs had nothing to do with medicine. Sallie Mae does student loans, which ObamaCare nationalized, prompting widespread layoffs.

Obama could also point out that 43,000 jobs is a tiny fraction of the total damage from his health-care bill, projected in February to reduce the workforce by 800,000 over the next ten years by the Congressional Budget Office… and that’s only a small slice of the carnage, specifically because “some people will no longer have to work just to afford health insurance.” So Obama could say that the number of jobs shoveled overseas by his tax hikes add up to only 5% of the jobs that will be lost because of the way he mutated the insurance market. Also, he could try to get some diplomatic leverage from the wonderful gift of high-paying medical technology jobs he’s sending overseas.

Well, all those lost jobs are worth it, as long as the ever-shifting number of uninsured who figure in Democrat propaganda (43%, 12%, 22%, it all depends on whether they’re afraid to include illegal aliens in the total on any given day) finally have health insurance, right? Wrong:

The percentage of uninsured Americans has risen from 14.6 percent to 17.3 percent over the same period, Gallup reported. In October, Wal-Mart announced that new part-time employees would not be allowed join the company’s health insurance plan.

Oh, well. The Democrats will offer to fix everything by nationalizing medicine in a couple of years, bringing us a happy ending as the vast, permanently unemployed underclass they have created finally gets “free” medicine.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.