Inside the Fox News spin machine: I fact-checked Megyn Kelly on Obamacare
When a guest said Obamacare made him sell his business, I called him for his full story. It was more complicated
Naturally, Mr. Lawrence was then invited on Fox News to be interviewed about his ordeal. He was on the Megyn Kelly show a week ago Friday.
Most of Kelly’s questions were fat softballs or in some cases just statements (“Employers like you might just have to say, ‘I’m gettin’ rid of my company!’”; “Your thoughts on having your livelihood directly affected based on what politicians in Washington felt was best for you?”).
I looked up Bill and decided to give him a buzz to learn more. He lives outside of Houston. We spoke for 45 minutes. He’s a guy who’s sort of hard not to like — funny, very sharp and obviously a very good businessman who built a large business from scratch.
Bill recently sold his company Bubbles Car Wash, with 13 locations and 290 employees, to a private equity fund for what he admitted was a tremendous price. “I’ve been very successful,” he acknowledged. (He boasted in a 2011 Houston Business Journal article that he owns two Mercedes and a Bentley convertible.)
With 290 employees, his business would be subject to the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate that kicks in in 2015 (assuming it isn’t delayed, as it has been once already), which will force companies to offer insurance to workers or else pay a penalty. Bill says it would have run him in the neighborhood of $400,000 annually.
My first question to him was: Would he show me some of his business’s financial records? Maybe an annual report, preferably something audited, so I could analyze his claim about the catastrophic effect Obamacare would have had on his business? He would not.
Did Megyn Kelly request such verification? No, he said, she did not.
I then pressed Bill on whether there were any other reasons he was selling his business. He admitted to me that there were plenty of others (“myriad reasons,” in his words). What were some of them? “You ever run a business?” he asked with a chuckle. And then he began ticking off a bunch of problems in his life that he said he’d now be glad to be rid of. The headache of managing workers. Taxes, fees and permits of every shape and size and color (dumpster permits, gate permits, this permit, that permit). He complained to me that he has to pay $300 for an “auto dealer’s” permit just to sell air fresheners at the checkout counter of his car wash centers.
From the sound of it, Gov. Rick Perry is more to blame for Bill’s choice to retire than Obama. Perhaps Texas is not the pro-business eden that Perry portrays it to be.
Eric Stern lives in Helena, Montana. He was senior counsel to Brian Schweitzer, former Governor. Follow him on Twitter at @_ericstern.
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