I’m a big fan of CNBC.  I watch it for seven or eight hours a day, Monday through Friday.  I’m retired these days and managing my own retirement plan, so I find it to be almost a necessity.  It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the American economy.

But there’s one thing I’m getting tired of.  It’s the parade of fat cats who come on and complain about the Affordable Care Act (known to them as Obamacare) as well as how high their taxes are.  Most of them are CEO’s of major companies or hedge fund managers.

The CEO’s can’t seem to accept that anyone other than them and their families and friends deserve to have access to good health care.  They also seem to believe that they are worth a thousand times the salaries of the people in their companies who actually do the work.  The only reason many of them have profitable companies is because they pay a large number of their employees the slave wage known as “minimum wage” or slightly above it.  If they paid a living wage to the people who made their companies work, it would be shown that they don’t really have any talent for producing a product or service with a profit any more than the slaveowners in the antebellum South did.

The hedge fund managers all believe that they’re being persecuted because they are being asked to pay their fair share of taxes instead of getting nonsensical preferential treatment of their earnings.  The CEO’s don’t much like their taxes, either.

But let’s talk about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for now.

They’re all coming on and making a big deal about the website and what a disaster it is.  Okay, there’s no denying it, they’re right about that.  Maybe if we had chosen an American company to design it, it would work better.  (Hey, we have a few people in this country who know about IT.)  But every new website has glitches at first.  I go on other websites every day that don’t work very well, some of them from the very companies of the CEO’s that are complaining.  (That’s not even mentioning their customer service telephone systems that are often useless.)  Remember, one of the problems is that so many of the states shirked their obligation of developing their own exchanges and sites, thus forcing the federal site to handle a great deal more traffic than originally planned.  But let’s face it, eventually the website problems will be solved.

Their next complaint is that some companies are dropping their employee health plans and forcing the employees to go onto the exchanges.  First, the question is how many companies are actually doing this.  Not many.  Remember, no company in the U.S. has ever before been required by law to provide health insurance for their employees.  Yet how many do?  Most companies that are not paying their majority of employees minimum wage have long had employer-paid or employer-subsidized health plans.  If they were not required to by law, why did they do that?  It’s because providing health care for their employees and their families was seen as a benefit to the employee and the company.  To the employee because he could stay healthy and he didn’t have to worry about his family having health problems.  To the company because good health means the employee could make it to work every day and not be distracted by money concerns when there was illness in his family.  For many years, companies in effect competed to see who could give their employees the best plans, as a tool to help attract the top candidates to work for them.  Is this really going to change in the long run?  Sure, some companies will use the ACA as an excuse to stop providing health plans to their employees, at least at first.  But in the long run, if you’re a candidate considering job offers, aren’t you going to go to the company that gives you the best package of salary and benefits, including health care?  Even the companies that drop plans at first will probably end up offering them again in the future.

As for those companies that pay their employees minimum wage and also don’t want to cover their health care, well, it’s just more proof that their CEO’s can’t successfully manage a company.

So, there it is for today:  my plea for CNBC to call for a moratorium on ACA complaints for a while.  It’s the law of the land, people. Why not have some guests on with constructive ideas on how to improve the law’s implementation?  Give it a try, CNBC.  Believe it or not, it will improve your shows.