The Free-Lunch Debates

Various letters from Inc. readers are featured responding to a CEO's column about Clinton's health-care insurance plan.

In our June issue, White Dog Cafe CEO Judy Wicks explained why company builders should embrace the Clinton health-care proposal -- but our readers weren't buying. What's interesting is why

Rarely has an article in Inc. sparked a response like the one to Judy Wicks's column, "Why Us?" (Mind of the Manager, June, [Article link]). It generated close to 50 letters from readers who disagreed with her argument that small businesses should be required to pay for their employees' health-care insurance and that the proposed Clinton plan offered the best way to afford it.

The letters, which agree overwhelmingly on key points, are notable for what they are not: whiny, inflamed, self-serving. They are not the small-minded and selfish rants we all hear from small-business advocacy groups. Nor are they the angry missives of cranks. Rather, they are eminently reasonable and informed pleas against Wicks's proposal -- and they are rooted in business-building experience, not social or political ideology.

Whatever has happened in Washington between the time we edited these letters and the time you're reading them (dare we guess, not much?), they're worth printing -- for while they collectively represent a mandate against employer mandates, they also provide a more-accurate-than-usual glimpse into the minds of today's businesspeople. They reflect a small-business sector that is informed about public-policy issues, willing to take its share of responsibility for civic expenses, passionate about the curative powers of the free market, and concerned with the way some constituencies fail to think through the consequences of their positions.

The health-care debate represents a gritty proxy for the debate over social responsibility, as well. It's easy, after all, to pledge after-tax profits to good causes; it's hard, and sometimes impossible, to commit a big chunk of cash to health insurance when you are running a struggling start-up. The letters illuminate the problems of those wrestling with that issue.

How is political debate conducted today? More than one-fifth of the letter writers used some variation of the line "As a restaurateur Wicks should understand there's no such thing as a free lunch." That coincidence might lead the paranoid to believe a conservative cabal has been at work, seeding the clouds of public opinion. In fact, when told of the response to the Wicks piece, one White House spokesperson warned that many of the letters could have been planted by the National Federation of Independent Business (the largest lobbying group for small business).

To which Terry Hill of the NFIB replied, "That's crazy -- they think everything we do is sinister and evil."

By far the most striking aspect of the discussion the letter writers carry on is its clarity. We couldn't help noticing that they seem to understand what the politicians do not: that any worthwhile policy debate has to be grounded in accurate, objective, unsentimental business thinking first.

But see for yourself. On the following pages is a (small) sampling of the health-care-debate mail.

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Dear Inc.: Apparently, Judy Wicks finds the restaurant business too challenging these days, so she wants Uncle Sam to make life easier for her. She's not seeking national health care for the well-being of those that lack it; she selfishly covets it because she mistakenly believes mandated health care will make her company more competitive. It won't.

I, too, have 22 years in the food-service business. I started when I was 12, and I bought my restaurant when I was 21. Over the past 13 years, we've grown and expanded. We sold more than $1.9 million in deli sandwiches, fresh salads, and desserts this past fiscal year. We have a staff of 35, two-thirds of whom work full-time.

We've offered health coverage for more than a decade to all our full-time employees, and my company has always paid the full premium. We provide coverage for the very reasons Wicks dreams about: it makes us a more effective employer. I want us to be the best restaurant possible. We can do that only with the finest, freshest produce, select cuts of beef, and honest, hardworking, friendly people. Medical coverage gives us an opportunity to attract those kinds of people.

As a fellow restaurateur I am especially disappointed that Wicks let a valuable asset walk out the door. She invested time and money in training a man and then let him walk? Shame on her! She prized her short-term profits more than his well-being, her company's goodwill, and most important, her customers' satisfaction. I'd think long, hard, and creatively about how to take care of my highly regarded employees before I'd wish them well down the street with a competitor.

[In her column Wicks based her argument for mandated health insurance on the need to attract and keep the best employees. She recently had lost a top waiter named Keith to what he called "a real job," which for him meant one that offered health insurance. Wicks said she would continue to lose the likes of Keith until she could afford to insure all 96 of her employees.]

Wicks wails that Keith left the White Dog Cafe to get a real job -- meaning one with health-care insurance, "something we could never offer," she says. But most of the successful restaurants I know do offer some type of medical coverage. If Keith stayed in the food-service industry, as Wicks's letter implies, then he left because the White Dog Cafe didn't measure up.

It's time for Wicks to get off her pity pot and get into the solution. I believe I've got one. Let's do some math for the White Dog Cafe to determine what health care would cost it without sticking the rest of us with socialized medicine.

If covering all 96 employees would cost $140,000 a year and Wicks is willing to add a 1% price increase to make it happen under the Clinton plan, she can grab another tiny 2.1% while she's at it and have enough to cover everybody now, without mandated health insurance. These are my figures: