Put on your schadenfreude hats, everybody. Sure, everything’s going to hell, but at least we can still laugh and laugh and laugh at our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters.
As we all know by now, we had to pass Obamacare to find out what’s in it. How’s that working out so far, Tinseltown? Feeling good about your decision-making process?
Three letters have been giving the payroll-services industry fits for several months now: ACA. That’s the semi-acronym for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, and it’s up to the payroll industry — which cuts checks to production workers and offers related financial services to TV and film studios — to help educate its clients on the rules before a good portion of the law kicks in Jan. 1.
“It’s a morass of regulations and requirements, and everyone’s trying to figure out what their exposure is,” says Eric Belcher, president and CEO of Cast & Crew Entertainment Services. Adds Mark Goldstein, CEO of Entertainment Partners, which has held 16 seminars to help studios understand ACA: “It’s going to be a very big deal.”
Well, yeah, it’s a big deal. Remember?
Here’s the best part of the story:
“ACA is thousands of pages, and it wasn’t written with this industry in mind,” says Belcher.
How about that. Anybody care to name all the other industries that weren’t kept in mind as Obamacare was being written? This is the Internet, so don’t worry about running out of space for your list.
Probable consequences of Obamacare include forcing studios to film even more productions in foreign countries, shorter production times, fewer full-time employees… Sounds great, doesn’t it? Even more rules for American workers, of which there will be even fewer, at even less pay.
Welcome to Utopia. Yay!
Congratulations, Hollywood. You won.
Might be time to watch Escape from LA again. It’s set in 2013, y’know…