CNN confirms Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter was lying about ObamaCare price increases

 

Posted by Will Stabley on Jan 25, 2013 in Featured, News, Politics | 1 comment

[Editor's note: Papa John's has contacted us with a response to this story, which you can read here]. Ahead of the 2012 Presidential election, Papa John’s founder “Papa John” Schnatter claimed that he would be raising the price of his pizzas by eleven cents to cover the increased costs on his business due to the “ObamaCare” Patient Protection And Affordable Health Care Act instituted by President Barack Obama. Liberals decried the move as a partisan attempt to sway the election on the part of a wealthy republican business owner, as ObamaCare simply requires that corporations allow their full time employes to pay for their own health care, and does not involve a financial component for employers one way or the other. CNN subsequently did some research into the issue and confirmed that Papa John is, in a word, lying…

In a piece titled “Fact-Checking Papa John’s CEO,” the cable news network attempted to piece together the math behind Schnatter’s claim. “Papa John” refused to disclose to CNN how many pizzas he sells a year, or how many full time employees he has, presumably in the name of keeping the math more difficult to calculate. But CNN ultimately concluded that “the math doesn’t matter” because ObamaCare places no financial burden on corporations. As it turns out, Papa John’s was making false claims that it would need to pay for health care for part time workers, which ObamaCare does not apply to…

  On a scale from true to misleading to false, CNN concluded that Papa John’s claims about ObamaCare were “false.” Now that Obama has won reelection and ObamaCare is set to become the law of the land in 2014 backed by the Supreme Court ruling which says that it’s fully constitutional, Schnatter has not surprisingly kept his prices the same as they were before the election. After all, his “eleven cents cost per pizza” claim turns out to have been something which the republican Schnatter apparently made up simply in the name of trying to help fellow republican Mitt Romney win the election; perhaps he was confusing it for the cost of the Romney fundraiser he held in his own mansion. Last week the CEO of Whole Foods was caught in a similar ObamaCare lie.