At Wednesday’s House Small Business Committee hearing entitled The Health Care Law: Implementation and Small Businesses, witness William J. Gouldin, Jr., President of Strange’s Florists, Greenhouses and Garden Centers, said: “[T]he constant rise in health insurance costs is regressively suppressing wages… I realized that this law would be the most disruptive instrument to the American workplace in my lifetime and no one seemed to know, or care, [that it was] right in the middle of the worst recession/depression since the Great Depression.”
Former OMB Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin said, “ACA’s 80 million hours of paperwork is the equivalent of 39,822 employees working an entire year filling out the law’s new paperwork (assuming a 2,000-hour work year). We can conceptualize paperwork burdens by examining gross domestic product per hour worked. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that figure was $61.59 in 2011. Thus, ACA’s red tape alone costs the U.S. approximately $4.9 billion annually, a figure that will grow as the pace of implementation quickens this year.”

Following his questioning of witnesses at the hearing, Congressman Tim Huelskamp
made the following statement:

“The costs of complying with Obamacare’s new paperwork, massive red tape, and uncertainty are crippling small businesses. Those that don’t go out of business cannot create new jobs. Others are laying off employees and demoting full-time employees to part-time. And others are passing the regulatory costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services. I hope House Republican leaders paid attention to this hearing so that they will come to understand why defunding Obamacare is so vital.”