ObamaCare: real world consequences

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President Obama, while campaigning for the passage of ObamaCare, remarked that if you liked your current health care plan, you could keep it. Unfortunately, no one thought to ask him if they'd be able to keep their job if it passed as well.

Stryker, the Kalamazoo-based maker of artificial hips and knees, will cut 5% of its global workforce by the end of next year to reduce costs in the face of new fees on device makers required by the U.S. health care law.

The job cuts will reduce annual pretax operating costs by more than $100 million beginning in 2013, when the medical-device excise tax is scheduled to take effect, Stryker said Thursday in a statement. Stryker had more than 20,000 employees as of Dec. 31, according to Bloomberg News data.

In order to pay for this monstrosity, in addition to accounting gimmicks, ObamaCare was going to hit up the manufacturers of medical devices for more of their scratch.

Please note that this excise tax doesn't take place until 2013 but companies, such as Stryker, are reacting to it already by laying off 1,000 employees. The geniuses that put together ObamaCare probably figured that the manufacturers of medical devices either wouldn't notice these taxes or would just absorb them into their operating costs. Who knows what the hell they were thinking because if you place and/or raise a tax on a consumer item, there is generally only two things that are going to happen: 1) the increased cost of that item will get passed along to the consumer and/or 2) the company making that item will have to reduce operating costs and the simplest way to do that is to lay off people.

When critics of ObamaCare, such as ourselves, say that it's a jobs-killer and that it won't lower the cost of healthcare, this is precisely what we are talking about.

This is a perfect real-world example of a business that is in the health care industry getting out ahead of the curve and reacting in a rational manner to the disastrous effects of ObamaCare.