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Rubio: “Defunding Obamacare in the short-term budget is the first step to rejecting the diminished future Obamacare guarantees, while restoring the free market principles that have made our economy the envy of the world and that offer the best way to reform our health care system.”

Rubio: Obamacare Will Devastate Florida’s Seniors, Workers
By Senator Marco Rubio
Pensacola News Journal
August 23, 2013
http://www.pnj.com/article/20130825/OPINION/308250006/Rubio-Obamacare-will-devastate-Florida-s-seniors-workers?nclick_check=1

Part of the American dream is the opportunity to work hard, enjoy retirement and leave your children better off than yourself. In Florida, we are blessed to be a top destination for people living out these dreams, with more than 3 million seniors residing here.

Unfortunately, Obamacare threatens to unravel their dreams by increasing health costs, disrupting current health plans, and preventing access to the doctors patients have come to trust.

Obamacare is also stifling job creation that hurts workers and leads to greater uncertainty about what their retirement years will hold.

As I traveled through North Florida recently, I repeatedly heard these Obamacare concerns.

In Gainesville and Jacksonville, entrepreneurs want to expand and hire more workers but are in a holding pattern because, even a month before its implementation date, Obamacare is full of unknowns. Businesses can’t plan for the future or commit to hire new employees as long as Obamacare’s mandates, taxes and regulations remain unclear or too burdensome.

One business owner I met in Gainesville sought legal help to ensure he would be in compliance with the law. A month later, he still had no clear-cut answer as the rules and regulations are too convoluted while others remain unwritten.

This is devastating to people trying to provide for their families because businesses are forced to delay new hires, reduce workers’ hours or have to lay them off.

In Pensacola, a grocery store owner told me he might stop offering insurance to his employees because he had some seniors working for him and it was going to be too expensive to keep doing so. Obamacare’s onerous regulations now make it easier for this employer to drop coverage, pay the Obamacare tax and have these workers buy their own insurance on the newly created exchange.

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