Obamacare's Broken Promises

Floor Speech

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Mr. KELLY. I thank my colleague from Tennessee.

I really appreciate the opportunity to talk tonight. And I think what I've found unusual in my 18 months here is that when I look at a lot of the legislation that comes forward, a lot of it is proposed by people who've never actually done what they're mandating people to do.

For most of my life, I was a small business person, still am. And when I get back home and I walk in the district and I talk to the people that are doing the same things that I've done all my life--I'm talking about small business people--they keep talking about the same thing. And the one thing that resonates with me all the time is the uncertainty of what this government does to them, the uncertainty of what this law, in particular, does to them.

When I talk about uncertainty in business, you cannot begin to project what your future costs are going to be on legislation for which the rules and regs still haven't been put in place. So we ask people to take this blind-faith leap--to go ahead, to go along with it.

The truth of the matter is you can't. You can't when it's your own skin in the game. You can't when it's your business that's at risk. You can't hire people when you don't know ultimately what the cost of those people is going to be.

Now, people say, Why is that a big problem? It's because it drives the cost of whatever it is that you do. Your personnel costs have an effect on whether it's the service you provide or the goods that you provide.

So the confusion that goes along with this bill is what puts job creators, small business people, in a quandary. They just don't know what to do because the law doesn't specifically tell them what it's going to cost. Again, because I've done it all my life and it has always been my skin in the game and it has always been my blood on the floor at the end of the day by making a bad decision, if it were about jobs, if it were about creating jobs, then this legislation surely didn't get the job done:

Between January of 2009 and April of 2010, private sector job creation improved by about 67,000 jobs a month. President Obama signed the PPACA into law at the end of March 2010. Since May of 2010, private sector job growth has improved at a rate of only 4,600 jobs per month.

Once people get a look at this law, it puts them on the sidelines. Once again, a law passed by this House and by the Senate and signed by the President puts the people who really do create jobs in a quandary. They look at us and they say, Please do something about this. Please get the government's boot off our throats. I can't continue to plan for the future with a law that doesn't project the total costs.

Look, we can talk about this on and on and on, but the American people know better than anybody else the effect that this has had on them. The job creators know better than anybody else what effect this has had on them. People in business who were never at the table know better than anybody else. Now I've gotten to the point where I understand, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. I've got to tell you that job creators were put on the menu. They are getting eaten alive by a piece of legislation that drives their costs of operation up and that mandates them to do something under penalty of law or to pay a fine that they don't want to pay.

The funny thing about it is, a guy like me, I wasn't given the opportunity. I wasn't given a waiver. Do you know what, KELLY? It may not work for you, so we're going to give you a waiver. But who did get waivers? There were some people who got waivers out there. But who were the people who got the waivers? Why did they get the waivers? We wonder why the American people don't trust this government and this administration. Why would you trust people who pick and choose winners and losers and who say, You will follow the law. You get a waiver? Really? Why? It's because we can do it.

That's not the America I know. That's not the America that my father fought for. That's just something that's inherently wrong with the way business is being done in this town.

So we can talk about this, and we can talk about all the good things and the bad things and the pieces we ought to keep and the pieces we ought to reject, and we can talk about the fact that we don't know what it's going to ultimately cost us. I'll tell you one thing: if you're starting a business now--and people start businesses all over the world--at one time, we were No. 4, the country that people wanted to start a business in. Now we've fallen way down. We trail now Macedonia, Georgia, Rwanda, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and Armenia.

It's more attractive to start a business in those countries than in the United States of America. And we wonder why? We wonder why so many millions of Americans are out of work? We wonder why job creators, small business people, won't hire people? We tell them, You're going to follow the letter of the law, or you're going to be fined. Then we wonder why they leave our shores and go to other countries?

If we're still wondering, we're either poorly informed or in denial. We have made it too hard for job creators to stay here. We have made it too hard for businesspeople to make decisions to hire people. We have made it too expensive for them, and we leave them no alternative but to stay on the sidelines. So when the President asks, Why are these people on the sidelines? Why aren't they investing? I will say, Please find the nearest mirror. Look in there. It is this administration and these laws that have put a choke hold on our economy.

Too many Americans have been waiting too long now for answers from a government that just doesn't have the right answers, but that tells them the way it's going to be without ever bringing them to the table in order to ask them, What is the effect on you, Mr. Businessman? How badly does this hurt you? At the end of the day, it's not about how bad it hurts the businesspeople. There is very little consideration given to us.

I thank the gentlelady from Tennessee for taking the time to bring this up in order for us to talk about it. We need to continue to talk about it, and we need to fix

something that is very badly broken.

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