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July 20, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:04
The Truth About Obamacare
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Hi everybody, my name is Stefan Molyneux.
I'm the host of Freedomain Radio.
This is the truth about Obamacare.
Oh my goodness, what a challenging rollout this has been, as we would say, in the IT world.
So I've attempted to go out and get just the facts so that you can make an informed decision about the laws and the implementation and come to your own conclusions about what is going on.
So as you probably know, President Obama's Affordable Health Care Act requires that almost all Americans carry health insurance or face a fine starting in 2014.
Now, this law was signed into effect in March of 2010, which basically means that the government has had about three and a half years to create and test the Obamacare website.
As you've probably heard, it's been about as catastrophic a rollout as you could imagine in the IT world.
I actually was an IT executive, entrepreneur, chief technical officer for about 15 years.
And designed, coded, built, marketed, and sold some pretty complex computer systems to a variety of public and private sector entities.
I know a little bit about best practices and how things should be rolling out, and we will see how this compares to best practices, this rollout of the Obamacare website.
Now, they have spent 500 to 600 million dollars.
They are refusing to release lists and names of all of the companies, although some of the people know about Have also been companies that have donated a lot of money to the Obama administration raising questions of possible cronyism and figures released recently have suggested that the total cost of this website could top A billion dollars.
And that, of course, is really challenging.
The idea that is being talked about now, a couple of weeks after the rollout, is that you're basically going to load up a cannon full of nerds and fire it at the website.
This is not going to work.
A website of this complexity, of this size, with this level of user requirements, is enormously complicated.
Probably millions of lines of code and database triggers all interacting together.
You change one thing over here, it might change something the other end of the application.
So it's going to take people months even to get up to speed on what is being done.
This site, assuming it doesn't need to be completely rewritten, which is probably the most likely thing that's going to happen, will not be functional in any significant way for, I would imagine, 8 to 12 months would be a minimum.
So this idea, you know, we're working around the clock to fix the problem is not valid.
Now, contractors assured a congressional committee on September 10th that they and their computer systems and the entire online federal healthcare marketplace was ready to enroll millions of Americans.
Now, there were some quality managers who said this is not ready for prime time yet.
They were largely shouted down.
One of the things that the contractors are complaining about is what's called scope creep, which is when the requirements...
For the package or the program change after significant portions of it have been implemented, which is kind of like adjusting the wings of an airplane mechanically while the plane is taking off as opposed to doing it in the hangar beforehand.
It's ten times more challenging.
One of the things that happened right before the system was rolled out was that the government suddenly said, no, no, no, no.
We had originally designed it.
So that people could browse the prices of these healthcare plans without requiring registration.
Then they changed it to say, no, no, no, people must now register before they can see any prices.
Now really, come on.
What kind of sense does this really make?
You can browse Amazon, you can browse eBay, you can even browse YouTube without registering because they want you to see what you're going in for before you register.
The only conceivable reason that I can imagine That you would suddenly require registration before people could see the prices, is you really don't want people to see the prices, for reasons that we'll get into in a moment.
All right, let's see what was promised versus what was delivered.
While the ACA was wending its way through the labyrinth of Congress in 2009 and 2010, President Obama famously promised the American people over and over again that if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.
Let's Hear a quote from one rally in July 2009.
Let me be exactly clear about what healthcare reform means to you.
First of all, if you've got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan.
Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.
Ah, but the President's promise is turning out to be tragically false for millions of Americans.
Healthcare policies are being cancelled all over the country because these policies don't meet the requirements for the Affordable Care Act.
According to health policy expert Bob Lazuski, approximately 16 million Americans will lose their current plans because of Obamacare.
For months we've heard about Obama's trillions in healthcare subsidies that are going to eliminate or reduce rate shock for the millions of uninsured Americans.
Of course, if you're uninsured, you're uninsured for probably very good reasons, which we'll get into in just a moment.
And so if you suddenly have to sign up for healthcare insurance, maybe you can't afford it, maybe you've got your money committed to other things, so there's going to be lots of subsidies from the government.
Unfortunately, it's not turning out to be true.
If you shop for coverage on your own, you're likely to see your rates go up, even after accounting for the impact of pre-existing conditions, even after accounting for the impact of subsidies.
Now, let's just take a moment to talk about pre-existing conditions.
It's really essential. If you want to understand what's going wrong with the American healthcare industry, one of the key things you need to understand is the problem of pre-existing conditions.
Can you imagine calling up an insurance company and saying, I need fire insurance like now!
And they say, why? My house is burning down, man!
I need it now! And they'd say, well, you can't buy it now because your house is burning down.
Your whole point is you have to buy it beforehand when you don't know that your house is burning down.
Well, the government has forbidden American healthcare insurance companies from rejecting claimants who have pre-existing conditions for years.
This has caused huge problems.
If you wait until you have cancer before applying for healthcare insurance, there's no possible way that your healthcare premiums can cover the costs of your cancer treatment.
Therefore, All the other people in the plan have to pay for your healthcare treatments because you didn't pay before.
And what that means is that young and healthy people are going to be disproportionately charged higher rates to pay for all the people who waited until they got sick before applying for healthcare insurance.
This is a huge problem which is only increasing under Obamacare.
Before Obamacare was passed, Obama said, Here is a guarantee that I've made.
If you've got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor.
However, in July 2013, the Obama administration said that people may be able to keep their doctor.
That's quite an important change.
I mean, imagine you get on a plane, you're going to Newark.
Say, we're going to Newark! And you get on the plane, you're in the middle of the A. Say, we may be going to Newark.
Well, That's kind of a change, right?
This is even more important than that.
In February 2008, Obama said, we are going to work with you to lower your premiums by $2,500.
We will not wait 20 years from now to do it or 10 years from now to do it.
We will do it by the end of my first term as president.
Lower your premiums by $2,500.
However, by the time that Obama's first term was over, family premiums have gotten bigger, not smaller.
The increase... It was over $3,000 per family.
See, it's one thing if you don't quite lower the premiums as much as you promised.
Maybe you've only got to $2,000 lower.
But $3,000 higher, that is quite a change.
Hey, I won $3,000 in the lottery.
Go to cash it in. Hey, I owe the lottery $3,000.
How the heck did that happen?
Much more important than that.
Based on a Manhattan Institute analysis of the HHS numbers, Obamacare will increase underlying insurance rates for younger men by an average of 97% to 99%, and for younger women by an average of 55% to 62%.
In North Carolina, well, I'm afraid you are quite hosed.
Individual market rates triple for women and quadruple for men.
Under Obamacare, rates for men and women are the same, which has the net effect of disproportionately increasing rates for men.
Who generally paid less under the old system?
When you say to insurance companies you cannot now discriminate on gender, what you're saying is that men must subsidize women.
Particularly under the age of 40, women use a much higher proportion of healthcare than men for a variety of intricate plumbing, which frightens me, and also because of having children and all that kind of stuff.
So there is a massive subsidy from men to women when you are no longer allowed to discriminate based on gender.
Now, nearly two-thirds of the uninsured in America are under the age of 40, and of course they're avoiding insurance because it's disproportionately higher because they have to pay for all the other people who waited till they got sick before getting healthcare.
These young and healthy people are essential to Obamacare unless you are a young, healthy person willing to pay massive multiples of what your healthcare insurance actually would cost in a free market.
Unless you're willing to subsidize women, old people, people who waited until they were sick before getting healthcare, if you're not willing to do that, the entire system will fall apart financially, which means the debt will be passed along to the future.
Let's look at some of these facts.
And you can pause this and remember the sources are in the low bar.
27-year-old man.
This is Affordable Care Act bronze premiums versus the premiums available before this for a 27-year-old man adjusted for pre-existing conditions.
So percent increase in price.
So the dark red are over 200% increases and then 100 to 200, you can sort of see this.
The blue are low increases or decreases, and as you can see, really not a lot of blue in this.
So, for young people, for young men, it's pretty catastrophic.
Let's look at this for a 27-year-old woman.
One or two more blue, a little bit less dark red, but again, increases in general.
40-year-old man, massive increases, of course, and there's only one state where you're going to get a decrease.
This is pretty catastrophic for a 40-year-old woman.
Again, slightly better in a few states for decreases, but most people are going to see a massive increase.
And this, of course, is after the administration promised everyone, in the lead-up to the bill, they promised everyone that the price was going to go down.
This is a very suspicious promise to make, for reasons of math and economics, but the promise was made, and this is the result.
So the U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people.
Because the Obama administration's regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent, about 85% of these, or about 60 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal.
This is very significant.
You will not be able to keep your existing plan for the vast majority of Americans.
And the Obamacare rules are very complex.
So, for example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010, when the law was passed, and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the year since, your plan has lost its grandfathered status and will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.
The moment you touch your plan, it is no longer grandfathered in.
16 million people are now receiving letters, I mean, not all 16 at the same time, but they're receiving letters from their carriers saying they're losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new healthcare law's benefit mandates.
The vast majority by January the 1st.
And most of the people are going to see some very significant rate increases because the healthcare law is covering a lot of people who are quite ill.
Now, these people should get healthcare.
I'm a big fan of sick people getting healthcare.
But the reality is that it is going to raise costs for everyone, particularly people who aren't yet sick.
So Kaiser Health News recently called up a few insurers around the country and found that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already received cancellation notices for their existing policies.
Quote, the cancellation notices which began arriving in August have shocked many consumers in light of President Barack Obama's promise That people could keep their plans if they liked them, according to representatives and reporters.
So here's a quote. Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80% of its individual policies in the state.
Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people about half its individual business in the state.
Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20% of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45%.
This is according to the Kaiser report.
Blue Shield of California sent roughly 119,000 cancellation notices out in mid-September, about 60% of its individual business.
About two-thirds of those policyholders will see rate increases in their new policies.
This would be completely illegal in the private sector to make commitments and promises to customers and then have the exact opposite happen.
So Kathy Kristoff of CBS Money Watch relates her own experience of seeing a 67% spike in her premiums So this is what she said.
She said, My premium, the letter added, would go from $209 a month to $348 a month, a 66.5% increase.
That would cost almost $1,700 annually.
What made my plan too substandard to survive under Obamacare?
Well, it did not provide maternity benefits.
I am 53 years old.
I figure pregnancy would require an act of God.
Incidentally, maternity benefits will be covered on men's policies too.
Let's hope medical science comes a long way so you guys can use those benefits.
My policy also did not cover substance abuse treatments or psychiatric care.
Okay, so when the government gets involved, very briefly, when the government gets involved in policies, in other words, when the government gets to dictate what has to be covered in healthcare plans, then everybody who's got requirements for healthcare wants everyone else to subsidize their healthcare. then everybody who's got requirements for healthcare wants everyone else It's natural.
I mean, it's human nature.
So women want other people to subsidize the costs of maternity benefits and so on, right?
Of course they do.
Because if everyone else pays for it, then you pay less.
But requiring 70-year-old men to cover maternity benefits, of course, is ridiculous.
It's unfair. It's unjust.
And it's kind of predatory.
And also, people who have more obscure ailments want those ailments to be forced on everyone else.
So everyone else has to pay for those ailments, and they have to pay proportionately less.
And this is one of the reasons why these healthcare plans have to cover more and more stuff to the point where they just become ridiculously expensive.
And this is another reason why healthcare is so expensive in the United States.
She continues to say, Meanwhile, the things that mattered to me that I would be able to limit my out-of-pocket costs if I had a catastrophic ailment got worse under my new Obamacare policy.
My policy, which is always paid 100% of the cost of annual checkups, had a $5,000 annual deductible for sick visits and hospital stays.
And this you see quite continuously in the Obamacare mandates, that you have enormously high deductibles.
Now, the reality is, of course, if you couldn't afford healthcare, having a hugely high deductible doesn't really help you that much, because you can't afford the deductible.
Once I paid that $5,000, she continues, the plan would pay 100% of any additional cost.
That protected me from economic devastation in the event of a catastrophic illness such as cancer.
Kaiser's Obamacare policy has a $4,500 deductible, she says, but then covers only 40% of medical costs for office visits, hospital stays, and drugs.
Out-of-pocket expenses aren't capped until the policyholder pays $63.50 annually.
Sure, that's only another $13.50, she says, but it adds to the additional $1,700 almost that I'm paying in premiums, making my personal cost for Obamacare add to $3,018 annually.
This, by the way, is the bare-bones policy under Obamacare, the bronze plan.
Premiums for plans that offer lower deductibles and premiums would cost almost twice as much, according to the Kaiser booklet.
The law is incomprehensible.
The law cannot possibly be understood by any individual or even any group of individuals.
So after the law was passed, and the law was highly complex in its nature when it was passed, the regulations that Obama has added to Obamacare after he signed it are 11 million words long.
That's 30 times as many words as the actual Obamacare law that Obama signed in March 2010 contained.
Now, because Obama added these 11 million words without approval from Congress, his actions are actually illegal.
And there's a lot of illegality in Obamacare, which we'll get to in a few minutes.
Exemptions. Now, after Obamacare was passed, the unions that supported this passage requested and received special exemptions from the law.
So within months after Obamacare was passed, Obama gave some organizations an exemption from some of the requirements of Obamacare.
As time went on, more than 1,300 organizations received these exemptions.
Now, these exemptions are illegal for two reasons.
Number one, Obama granted these exemptions without approval from Congress.
Congress passed the law, Congress is responsible for the law, and the law cannot be modified without congressional approval, but Obama bypassed Congress and simply granted extensions probably written in lipstick on the back of a napkin.
And also the Constitution requires the law to treat everyone the same, and so granting exemptions from Obamacare is anti-constitutional, it's unconstitutional.
To add to the tasty frappe of political hypocrisy, after Obamacare was passed, politicians who voted for it asked for special exemptions for their own districts.
So Obamacare is partly paid for by a medical device tax.
Now, in case you were confused about this, medical devices don't in fact pay tax, therefore consumers will pay that tax.
It is a tax on consumers.
All taxes on objects are taxes on consumers, just like all taxes on corporations are taxes on employees.
So some medical device manufacturers have announced plans to lay off employees, including Welch Allen, 275 planned layoffs, Stryker, over 1,100 planned layoffs, and Medtronic, 1,000 planned layoffs.
In December 2012, Al Franken, Elizabeth Warren, John Kerry, and 15 other Democrats who supported the passage of Obamacare wrote a letter to Harry Reid asking him to delay the tax on medical devices, claiming that the tax It would hurt job creation in their districts.
Other districts, apparently, be damned.
Politicians who voted for Obamacare wanted an additional exemption for themselves and their staff after it was passed.
In 2013, members of Congress and their staff complained that Obamacare was going to cost them a lot of money and said that this would likely cause a brain drain among their staff because it's too expensive to implement for Congress.
Because remember, Congress doesn't have that much money, right?
In response to this, Obama made changes to Obamacare so that these things would not happen.
However, Obama's actions were illegal because he made these changes without Congress voting on them first.
Because, of course, you would not want the public spectacle of Congress voting to exempt itself from a law that Congress passed on everyone else.
Ah, my good friends in Massachusetts.
The people of Massachusetts were huge supporters of both Obamacare and President Obama, voting for him, of course, twice in both elections.
But even they eventually ended up asking for their own special exemption from Obamacare.
And in August 2013, Obama gave an Obamacare waiver.
To an entire state, the state of Massachusetts, who had voted for him and, through Paul's, was reported to enthusiastically support Obamacare, but for everybody else.
The creation and implementation of the Act has been shrouded in near-Soviet levels of secrecy, so although Obama had made a campaign promise repeatedly to have all the healthcare reform negotiations broadcast on C-SPAN, he broke that promise after he was elected.
The secrecy of the negotiations was so strong that US Congresswoman and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi famously said, we have to bust the bill so that you can find out what's in it.
I feel my trust flower blooming in my heart.
Obama used Obamacare to illegally give the IRS additional powers without approval from Congress.
In May 2013, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius solicited donations from health insurers.
You know, when someone high up in the government comes and asks you for a donation, you probably get a few more people listening with a little bit more attention than if somebody from the United Way comes by.
So she solicited donations from health insurers to help pay for Obamacare.
This solicitation is, in fact, illegal.
I will give you four guesses as to whether she faced any negative repercussions from this.
Obamacare has raised the interest rate on student loans from 5.3% to 6.8%.
The money, of course, is used to fund Obamacare.
In June 2013, it was reported that Obama had hired 16,500 new IRS agents to run Obamacare.
But I guess some of the people who were laid off from medical device firms could reapply as IRS agents, so that could work.
In March 2011, 15 IRS agents illegally seized the medical records of 10 million people without a warrant.
Obama refused to fire or prosecute any of them, because again, you don't want publicity for this kind of stuff.
And the IRS agents who run Obamacare enthusiastically do not want to participate in it.
In August 2013, it was reported that less than 3% of federal employees wanted to participate in Obamacare.
Now, federal employees rarely see a government program that they don't like, but I guess the planets aligned, and this is one they found that they did not like.
Now, this is very important.
In August 2013, it was reported that the Obama administration would not Be doing background checks on Obamacare, quote, navigators.
So the navigators are people that you can call to help step you through the process of applying for the healthcare, because apparently the website and the call-in line aren't enough.
Now, these navigators would have access to people's personal, private, and financial information.
Now, on the website, and recently they just tested this in Illinois, on the website...
In Illinois and in other places, you can click on a hyperlink that says, here are all of the navigators available to you for help with your information, with your website and so on, with your application.
Now, a reporter found that of the hundreds of people, hundreds of groups, organizations and people who were listed as navigators, there was a little note at the bottom that said, these people have not all been approved.
So he called up the administration and said, well, wait a minute.
What does that mean? Does that mean these are just people who've applied?
Am I going to be handing out personal financial information to people who've only applied to be these navigators?
And they would not give him an answer. So be very careful about that.
All right, so let's geek out.
This is the preparation for the website.
The administration...
Never tested the complete user experience of the federal exchanges at all before the system launched.
According to a Businessweek source, the federal exchange system, quote, went live without attempts to replicate a customer's complete experience.
Now, they did run particular separate tests on various modules, and they failed.
The Washington Post reported that a trial run intended to see whether the system could handle large numbers of simultaneous users crashed When just a few hundred simulated users were logged in.
The other thing that's happened is the website downloads a bunch of code to your local computer stores, cookies, and so on, and this is a huge problem because whenever you change the code on the server, the program locally checks for the code on the local computer, so you have to go and clear your cache and clear your cookies and so on, and I don't know if people think that means flushing money and cookies down the toilet, but it's really hard to maintain a site when The information is stored locally.
Of course, when you delete the local information, then the local computer has to go back to the server to get more data and more code, thus slowing down the experience as well.
So it's really bad coding practices for anything but the most robustly tested system, and this is why it's going to be really tough to fix.
The exchange system was supposed to interface seamlessly with state-run Medicaid programs.
That functionality, which was already delayed until November the 1st, has now been further delayed, and they basically say, we have no idea when it will be ready.
So, on September 26th, very shortly before the rollout, President Obama described how easy it would be to shop for health insurance when new health exchanges opened across the nation just one week later.
There's been a lot of things said, a lot of misinformation, a lot of confusion, he said.
His speech was intended to help set the record straight.
Starting on Tuesday, he said, For your state.
From there, he said the process of buying insurance would be real simple.
I'm sure he used the word folks about 90 times as well.
It's a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans side by side, the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak, same way you shop for a TV on Amazon.
You just go on and you start looking and here are all the options.
If you've ever tried to buy insurance on your own, he said, I promise you, this is a lot easier.
Now, this is September 26, less than a week before the exchanges were set to open, and no test had been performed on whether a user could successfully navigate it.
No successful tests had been performed on more than a few hundred people using it without it failing, which I guess leads to two questions.
Number one, did the president know that this was the status of the project?
If so, then he was lying.
If he didn't know, then is he really that competent to run this kind of stuff?
Well, I will let you be the judge.
So what was talked about in terms of costs?
Well, before Obamacare was passed, Obama promised, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future.
And to prove that I'm serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don't materialize.
Of course, after Obama signed it, the Washington Post reported that it would add more than $340 billion to the budget deficit over the next decade.
In March 2012, the Congressional Budget Office said that over the next decade, Obamacare would cost twice as much as what Obama had promised.
In May 2013, it was reported that Obamacare's program for high-risk patients was more expensive than he'd promised, and Obamacare includes a 40% tax on so-called Cadillac insurance plans, in other words, insurance plans that have low deductibles and co-pays.
In August 2013, unions that supported the passage of Obamacare complained about this tax.
The pricing is very important.
Really, pricing is the essence of what's being offered through this plan, and the pricing is often incorrect.
So, healthcare.gov lumps people only into two broad categories, 49 or under and 50 and older.
Now, prices for everyone in the 49 or under group are based on what a 27-year-old would pay.
Well, that's quite a bit lower than 40.
In the 50 or older group, prices are based on what a 50-year-old would pay.
This, of course, is outright deception.
So for 49 or under, they're artificially slanting the cost low by telling you what a 27-year-old would pay.
In 50 or older, they're artificially slanting the cost low by telling you what a 50-year-old would pay.
This is not what you're going to actually get when you apply for the insurance.
So CBS News ran the numbers for a 48-year-old in Charlotte, North Carolina, who was ineligible for subsidies.
According to healthcare.gov, she would pay $231 a month, but the actual plan on Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina's website costs $360, which is more than 50% higher.
A 62-year-old in Charlotte looking for the same basic plan would get a price estimate on the healthcare.gov website of $394.
The actual price is $634, 61% higher.
Industry executives that CBS News spoke to could not believe that the government is providing these estimates, which they said were useless and could easily mislead consumers.
They also said that the website repeatedly states that actual prices could be lower, but it makes no mention that they could be higher.
Astonishingly deceptive, and again, if you tried this as a private insurer, terrible things would result.
In September 2013, this is how ridiculous privacy concerns have become in America.
It was reported that Obamacare requires doctors to ask patients personal questions about their sex lives and to put their answers into an electronic database.
Doctors who avoid doing this will be penalized.
A cardiologist was interviewed and said, I have no idea why I would need any of this information, and it's frankly offensive to ask my patients.
The Obama administration, when this was raised as a privacy issue, said that patients who wished to keep their information out of the electronic database should pay in cash.
Obamacare also hits married couples with an annual tax of up to $11,000 for being married instead of single.
Now, of course, in front of the US Supreme Court, the Obama administration argued that Obamacare is a tax.
According to the Obamacare calculator, Obamacare places Now, the source code for the Obamacare website states, quote, You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system.
At any time and for any lawful government purpose, the government may monitor, intercept, and seize any communication or data transiting or stored in this information system.
Any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system may be disclosed or used for any lawful government purpose.
Now, after the NSA revelations, lawful government purpose means we have the data, we'll use the data.
What's interesting and really quite deceptive and tragic is that this information is buried in the source code of the website.
In other words, it is not displayed to the end user unless you right-click and say, view source and scan through all the garbage to find this.
This is literally like printing the warning labels for cigarettes on the inside of the cigarette paper or Writing it in a prescription bottle on the inside of the bottle in invisible ink and saying, well, no, no, no, under certain lights, under a full moon, you can see it.
This is really deceptive as well.
Legitimate shopping websites such as Amazon, you're allowed to browse merchandise without having to enter your personal information.
In order to look at any insurance plans, you have to put in your name, social security number and other personal information.
And you can call up these navigators who may be felons or who knows who, right?
Not vetted, not background checked, not validated.
This is really catastrophic and healthcare information and financial information is incredibly sensitive and personal.
People now are going to have their sex life information broadcast across the world in this way.
Now, as you've probably heard, of course, Obamacare only kicks in at 30 hours or more a week, so this has encouraged employers to switch their employees from full-time to part-time.
The New York Times reported that Obamacare sharply penalizes full-time employment in favor of part-time employment.
In response to the employer mandate for Obamacare, some restaurants have announced plans to switch some of their employees from full-time to part-time.
I actually went to our website, and it's linked below.
You can browse all of the restaurants, the businesses, the universities and so on that have all dropped People down to part-time.
The 40-hour workweek is kind of the basis and the bedrock of the middle class.
And once you start chipping away at that, you create the increasing donut hole where the middle class used to be that adds a lot to political instability and economic instability in the West.
So this, again, is pretty tragic.
Thank you very much for your time and attention during this presentation.
My name is Stefan Molyneux. I'm the host of Freedom Aid Radio.
It's the number one philosophy show on the internet.
I hope that you will check it out at freedomainradio.com.
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