I'm going to ask you to use your imagination...

for a few minutes.  I have a purpose, I promise.

Imagine for the moment that you're the owner of a restaurant (this may be true for some of you).  Not just one restaurant in fact, but ten of them scattered across a major city.  They're franchises in a chain of sit-down places, not some crappy fast food joint.  Sit down, order from a sever type places.

You have to staff the place 13 hours per day (11 of which you're open, 2 of which you're doing opening or closing prep).  Now if you've got most of your staff working full-time and some working part-time, come January, you're going to either be providing a new health insurance benefit for all of the workers who do more than 30 hours a week.  Or you're going to be paying $2,000 a year in penalty for every one of those working more than 30 hours per week after the first 50.  Since you've got 15 full time employees at present in each location, that's 100 employees at $2,000 each that you're going to be fined, or $200,000.

How many of you are going to cut back your employee's hours below 30 per week to avoid having to make the choice between paying for a health insurance plan you can't afford, or paying $200,000 in annual penalties?

That's the unintended consequence of one aspect of Obamacare.  Now I'm not saying that the notion of providing everyone with healthcare is a bad one.   I'm just pointing out that employers are going to make  cost benefit analysis.  If they're going to have to spend 150 times $200 per month times 12 to buy a cheap HMO plan (that's $360,000 annually), pay $200,000 in penalties annually, or cutback employees so everyone is full-time, what are most business owners going to do?  I suspect they'll engage in cutbacks.  Some employers have already announced that this is their intention.

Now that I've got that off my chest, let me rail at those of you who are idiotic enough to say you should be allowed to avoid the mandate of either getting coverage or paying a fine.  I want you to imagine for a moment.  Imagine that you're no longer required to buy automobile insurance.  You know you're not going to have an accident, so you don't really need it.  You're a great driver.  You've been driving for over a decade without incident.  You're young, so your reflexes are really good.

But lo and behold, you've just had a major car accident.  You're fine but the other driver has injuries that are going to cost $100,000 to fix.  Bet you wish you had insurance now.  Bet you wish you could pick up the phone and call the automobile insurer and say "you can't exclude me from coverage, even if I have had an accident."

Yes, Obamacare has rules that make it fairly easy for you to get coverage even with a pre-existing condition.  But if the Congress is smart, they'll move to amend this law, to exclude those who pay the penalty rather than get coverage, so they can't just opt in once they get sick.  If that happens, you're going to be as far up the creek without paddle as you were in the above example about having a car accident without automobile insurance.

The election will be over tonight (or maybe later if the results require more time).  But come January, the imperfect solution of Obamacare that will result in employers cutting back full-timers to part-time, and allowing people to opt out until they need coverage without any real consequence needs to be addressed.