Steve Wynn: "I'm Freightened to Death About the Future of Business"

Real Clear Politics
Oct. 25, 2011

Wynn Resorts CEO Steve Wynn slams President Obama and congressional Democrats on health care and the economy.

"The policies of this administration have destroyed the living standard of the working class in America. What is ostensibly the base of the Democratic Party is taking the worst hit in history because of these unbelievably uninformed policies of this president and his colleagues who have fostered this ridiculous class warfare, these nonsensical policies that have been proven to be ineffective and unsuccessful everywhere they've ever been tried in the world."

He goes on to discuss health care reform.

"[Health care costs] were escalating before [the health care law passed] at a rate of about 8 percent a year, and the devastation of ObamaCare we estimate to be north of 12 percent. That is to say the rate of escalation of health care costs has increased by 50 percent because of what they did."

He says that Harry Reid hung up on him "for the first time in 40 years" recently and that Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), who is running for Senate in 2012, told him she supported the health care bill because she feared Nancy Pelosi would "punish" her.

"I supported a Democratic Congresswoman named Shelley Berkley. I called her during Obamacare. I said, 'Shelly, what are you doing? How do you do this? This is killing unions and all of us supplying health care to our employees,'" Wynn recalled. "She said to me, quote, this is not hearsay — Shelly said to me — and she is running for the Senate — ‘Steve, I know it's terrible. My husband's a doctor, and he hates it, too. If I don't vote for it, she will punish me,' she being Nancy Pelosi."