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Owner of Las Vegas Metro Pizza fears he won't be able to handle health care costs, will have to resort to layoffs
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And -- to Obama -- it is pretty small business owners on edge many say they just can't pay for it that is causing skyrocketing health care costs.
-- -- me is the owner of metro peace in Las Vegas with 200 employees he -- been forced provide health insurance for hundreds of employees.
Is going to kill you financially.
Does that mean layoffs Sam joins -- -- -- Sam.
-- Greta how are you.
I'm for you out so I understand the Sam you provided some health insurance now for some employees but that -- obamacare that things will change dramatically for you tell me.
Well most of our employees actually are younger and in their teens are in their twenties and they really choose not to have any health care coverage or choose not to pay for any.
And with the new law coming into effect in 2014.
All of that as we all know will change.
And we have -- 22000 dollar per employee.
Tax or penalty that we will have to pay.
And that's just something that is extremely difficult for business like ours.
That's.
Hi employee.
Labour intense business and a low profit per employee business to be able manage properly.
So that I some of -- under Stella but -- -- about a family business how many years.
My cousin and I have on this business for 32 and a half years we've been in town since 1980.
-- violated.
And they -- laid off people.
We have never had to lay off despite all of the peaks and valleys of the economy and all the different challenges that we've been faced we've made it a point to never lay anyone off.
And we really don't look forward to the possibility of that either we're going to see what we can do.
In other ways but there's only really two major areas that we could.
Work with a cost like this and that would be our cost of goods sold -- -- labor.
In terms of this changed -- calculated how much they obamacare will probably cost -- number one and number two to figure it out and to keep the records are you going to have to harsh summer do you notice -- gonna handle that.
Well that's another problem with the way the bill as written is that they're calling a full time employees.
Thirty hour -- week employee.
And -- nor industry there are flexible hours and and our company many people have flexible hours and that's one of the attractions of coming to work -- restaurant.
And of the thirteen million restaurant employees around the country that's one of the major attractions is that you can have flexible hours what that means is.
That you can one week -- 25 hours and another week you may be up to 35 or more.
How you stay in compliance with the law is going to be difficult for a company like ours to be able to.
Understand and maintained because those hours keep going up and down we would actually have to hire someone that just watches over that.
And because we would want to of course thing compliance with the law but it makes it very difficult besides the cost involved.
To go back your first question.
The cost to us to our company would be about an additional 300000 dollars which quite frankly I'm not sure how we're going to be able to pay for that.
Without doing some other dramatic things you are the way we put together our company and the way we have our financial model structure.
We did you don't White House meeting about Obama Karen had thought that at some point that you're one of the members of went to the White House that right.
I knew I was fortunate to be part of a group members of the industry that were asked by the White House to come -- And to their credit they wanted to know this was over eighteen months ago.
They wanted to know how all of this.
Bill the way it was written the way the regulations were put together might impact our industry.
And we were able to share with them and they were very interest in hearing what it was about the way the bill was written that -- cause our industry some concern.
Did they do anything -- as a result of the me did they change anything -- make it easier.
Well you know I honestly don't know what.
What the outcome the ultimate outcome of that was there's still writing regulations.
But.
Some of what we were talking about were kind of hard wired into the law.
And I think they really need it just trying to understand what some of the impacts.
Of these regulations would be on an industry like ours which is a labor intensive industry.
-- -- said bedtime to do it after it's hard wired in to bring people -- to talk about it to figure out how to infected that's of a lousy time I hope that they do something and that it wasn't just a photo op with a lot of small business.
Voters not get the last word on that Sam.
Okay.
Thank you very much thank you sent.
