The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the International Franchise Association commissioned Public Opinion Strategies to conduct a poll of decision-makers at businesses, both franchise-owned and non-franchise-owned with 40 to 500 employees. The 414 surveyed, representative of the employers of over 25% of the populace and the group of employers most affected by the provisions of ObamaCare, give lie to the administration’s claim that ObamaCare will not negatively affect, and is not already negatively affecting, the job market:

– Many businesses are already seeing their health care costs increasing because of the law. To cope, 31% of franchise and 12% of non-franchise businesses have already reduced worker hours, a full year before the employer mandate goes into effect.

– Additionally, 27% of franchise and 12% of non-franchise businesses have already replaced full-time workers with part-time employees. Other cost control methods cited by survey participants included hiring only temporary help and cutting benefits and bonuses.

When those with between 40 and 70 employees were asked about the 50 full-time-equivalent cutoff between having to offer those working at least 30 hours per week health insurance and not having to offer those employees health insurance, a majority plan to ensure they either remain below or drop below that threshhold by 2015.

It is not as though these business owners and human resource directors really want to do this. Quoting a Quick Serve Restaurant owner from Kansas:

“The workforce, the backbone of the people here, are the hourly people. They rely on a forty-hour week. You take ten hours away, that’s going to kill people. But I guarantee you that more companies and corporations will do just that because that’s the loophole that is in there. It’s not a win-win. Having everyone insured is a great idea, but this is the wrong way of going about doing it.”

The biggest shock to those employees, however, is still down the road, delayed a year by the administrative delay in the employer mandate to provide health insurance. Among the 208 franchise-owned business stakeholders surveyed, 28% of them expect to drop health insurance coverage between now and the end of 2014, which means 60% of franchise-owned small-to-medium-sized businesses will not be offering health insurance when the employer portion of ObamaCare is fully in effect.

A similar situation faces the employees of non-franchise owned businesses. 28% of those businesses also are expecting to drop health insurance coverage between now and the end of 2014, which means 37% of small-to-medium-sized businesses will not be offering health insurance come 2015.

Michael Ramirez was more right than he knew when he penned the limitation to President Barack Obama’s infamous “If you like your plan” series of shattered promises: