I just finished reading an article on how businesses in San Francisco, specifically restaurants, are adding surcharges to cover the San Francisco universal health care plan. San Francisco enacted their plan about a year ago and it is readily apparent in how these costs of government mandated insurance programs are working - THEY PASS THE COSTS TO THE CUSTOMERS!

So essentially what you get are new fees from the businesses and services you utilize. In the San Francisco restaurants many are adding what they call a “Healthy Surcharge” to the tab. This is generally around 4 percent of the bill. So instead of the government imposing a tax (so they can say they did not raise taxes) the businesses are essentially doing it to their customers.

Some may say “well it is only 4 percent” - imagine everything in your life now increasing in cost by 4 percent! If you are in the millions that could not afford insurance to begin with now your money is only getting you 96 percent as far as before - that is if you make $24,000 per year you now are making the equivalent of $23,040 or $960 a year or $80 a month less then you were before.

$80 a month is a great deal of money when you are only making $24,000 a year, especially if you have children to feed, rent to pay, etc.

People need to understand that businesses either pass along their costs and include a margin for profit or they go broke and go out of business. So you can see that businesses do not pay taxes - they add it to the cost of the goods and services you purchase. Businesses do not simply suck up a new cost - they pass the cost on in the price of goods and services you purchase.

It is time that we as Americans awaken our financial minds and find a way out of this mess. We need to drastically reduce entitlement programs - we simply can not afford them no matter if we have to pay for them with a new tax or a new fee.