Not initially. Few CEOs don't care about the future of their companies. They care about their bottom line today. I hate to sound conspiratorial but people should remember it was the insurance companies that helped craft this bill.
“Few CEOs don’t care about the future of their companies. They care about their bottom line today.”
CEO compensation is heavily weighted to performance in the current year. The average CEO of a publicly held company has a tenure of 3 years. Given the compensation bias toward short term performance and short tenure, the CEO is motivated to focus on today and worry about tomorrow later. The CEO is a hired hand trying to maximize her/his income. Usually corporate CEO’s have a small amount of their personal wealth tied up in the company. If the company goes under in a few years, the CEO has already banked his multimillion dollar compensation package for 2013 and 2014. If he perceives the company will fail in two to three years due to Obamacare he’ll do everything he can to maximize his compensation this year, regardless of the long term impact. At the same time he’ll be aggressively seeking a job heading up a company in another industry.
Entrepreneurs owning privately held small businesses or larger companies think differently. They usually have most of their personal wealth tied up in the business and therefore have the financial incentive to drive long term performance. They will sacrifice current year profits in order to ensure stronger performance in the future. If the company fails in two to three years the entrepreneur loses everything so he will do whatever he can to make sure the company survives even if the actions required for the company will result in a personal financial loss.
The CEOs of Humana, Blue Cross, United Healthcare and the other big insurance companies will financially gain from this debacle no matter whether or not the bargain they made with big government fails. It will be the entrepreneurial owners of small medical equipment suppliers and medical device manufacturers (i.e. job creating small business) who will lose income in the short term as they try to position their companies in a time of great uncertainty and capricious government regulation. Likely they will ultimately lose their companies and their accumulated life savings as government increasingly decides the winners and losers in the healthcare industry by arbitrarily dictating pricing and product specifications based on political considerations.
What really frosts me more than anything is that the real villains in this are the mainstream media! If we had a responsible, independent media, I really think Obama would not even have received the nomination, much less been elected POTUS. They suppressed every negative thing that they knew about Obama's background and have allowed him to get away with offenses that would have them demanding the impeachment of a Republican president. Only the total incompetence demonstrated by the Obamacare roll out and the evidence that he blatantly and intentionally lied for years about the true details of the plan has gotten them to tell even a little bit of the truth about this evil man.