Leadership Quote by Rick Perry

Obamacare has got everyone "on edge" is less policy critique than mood engineering. Rick Perry opens with a nervous-system metaphor, not a spreadsheet, because anxiety travels faster than facts. The line frames the Affordable Care Act as a fog machine: the real problem isn’t what the law does, but that it creates uncertainty. That’s a classic political move when you’re arguing against a complex bill whose benefits are diffuse and whose implementation details are still being negotiated.

The sentence also performs a neat bit of constituency stitching. "Small business - men and women or big business" flattens conflicting interests into one unified, put-upon category: employers. Small businesses often resent administrative burdens; big businesses often have the scale to absorb them. Perry bundles them anyway to suggest a national consensus of dread, and the awkward dash-and-correction reads like live, down-home authenticity while doing that coalition work.

Then comes the key pivot: "we have no idea what this is going to cost, but we know it's going to cost us and cost us a lot". It’s a rhetorically potent contradiction. Ignorance becomes proof; uncertainty becomes indictment. The subtext is that government action is presumptively expensive and that employers are the ones who pay when Washington experiments. It’s also an attempt to move the conversation away from coverage expansion or patient protections and toward job-creator victimhood.

Context matters: this is post-ACA passage politics, when opponents leaned hard on implementation unknowns, premium headlines, and compliance fears. Perry’s intent is to make the law feel economically reckless before anyone has time to experience it as healthcare.