I’ve never liked Papa John’s pizza, it always tasted like tomato sauce and cardboard to me. So the fact that I won’t be ordering from Papa John’s in the foreseeable future should not really affect their bottom line. However, some of you out there, might be ordering this crappy pizza and you might want to rethink that. John Schnatter, who you might know better as “Papa John”, said that if ACA goes into effect in 2014, he will be raising the price of their pizza.
But as Matthew Yglesias explains, the real winner of ACA and the politicizing of pizza will be our local Mom and Pop pizza shops — you know the small businesses that Republicans always say the Obama administration is killing.
Firms with fewer than 50 employees are exempted from the ACA’s “employer responsibility” provision (which says you pay a penalty if your workers don’t get health insurance) and firms with fewer than 25 employees get subsidies. Specifically, if you have fewer than 25 employees and your employees earn less than $50,000 on average then you get a tax credit to defray 35 percent of the cost of providing health insurance to your workers. It seems to me that many non-chain pizza operations are going to fit that criteria, and the Affordable Care Act will essentially let them offer workers a dollar’s worth of compensation with sixty five cents worth of revenue.