Affordable Care Act

TAKEAWAY: AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

AUDIENCE MEMBER:
How will the demise of the Affordable Care Act affect you and your employees?

EASTERBROOK:
Again, what I’ve got to come back is we’re fundamentally a franchising business. The company owns around 10% of the restaurants here in the US. Owner/operators, which is independent businessmen and women, own the others. So the risk and rewards of life are shared equally across that kind of ownership mix. I think it’s fair to say that the financial impacts of it, as it was being rolled out, was not as significant as we thought it may be, and hence, if there’s going to be a transition from that, I don’t see therefore any other benefit being that significant either. We don’t know what we’ll have to replace it with, because you still want to take care of people.

So for us, we want to do the right thing for our employees, want to do the right thing for our owner/operators. This is not about financial expediency and trying to make short-term money. This is about trying to set in place—but there’s still, I think, as many unknowns as there are knowns on that one. So we’re keeping close to it, and as I say, we’ll try and do the right thing by people, mindful that the majority of our business is run by independent owner/operators.