Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

The old adage — what will not kill you makes you only stronger — certainly doesn’t apply to a bacon cheeseburger from Five Guys Burgers and Fries. This tasty gut bomb delivers two days’ worth of saturated fat and nearly 1,000 calories, a la carte. I hacked my way through one of these heart-stoppers the other day, and though I still have a pulse, it stayed with me in ways that would not please any doctor.

Immersion journalism was called for after a Five Guys franchise owner, Mike Ruffer, complained last week about the new law requiring him to offer his employees health care next year. At first, he thought Obamacare’s mandate wouldn’t apply to him.

“I was fat, dumb and happy,” said Ruffer, who employs 147 people at his eight burger outlets in the Raleigh-Durham, N.C., area. “I’m not happy anymore.” I will take him at his word on the dumb part.

As for the rest, here’s a guy selling something that is a leading contributor to the major health breakdowns in America, a product that may ultimately hasten an early death. He won’t offer insurance to the poorly paid workers who make said time bombs. But now that he’s forced to, and plans to raise prices to cover the care, he thinks this is an awful thing.

And Five Guys is not exactly struggling. It is the fastest growing restaurant chain in our fast food nation, with revenue projected to pass $1 billion this year.



In the burger master’s view, the government is forcing him to “pass on the costs to customers,” he said. But he already passes on considerable costs to customers who may never sniff a Five Guys fry. Because he doesn’t give his employees health care, they show up as charity cases at the hospital emergency room when something goes wrong. Last year, the uninsured cost the system $39.3 billion. Guess whom the expenses are passed on to?

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This argument — trying to shame those who don’t pay for health insurance and who force those who do to pick up their costs — was originally made by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The mandate was the basis of Mitt Romney’s successful health care overhaul in Massachusetts and is the basis for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

But now that the Heritage Foundation has turned against its policy progeny, it needs to flip the debate. So, Mike Ruffer was brought in as the star witness at a Heritage forum designed to show just how egregious it is that businesses will have to provide health care for their employees, or pay a fine. Right wing media — Drudge, Breitbart, Fox — played their part, sounding alarms over a cheeseburger that may cost an additional quarter.

But what the Heritage histrionics unintentionally showed was everything that is absurd, wrong and darkly humorous about the American approach to diet and health care economics.

Consider the business. Five Guys is a great success story. Started in the Washington, D.C., metro area by the family of Jerry Murrell in 1986, it has since expanded to more than 1,000 locations. The family stake in the company is worth about $375 million, according to Forbes. Even President Obama has made a pit stop at the Zagat-rated burger shack. Without doubt, the burgers and fries are addictive.

But they are not necessarily good for you. The Center for Science in the Public Interest placed Five Guys’ bacon cheeseburger on its 2010 list of the most unhealthy meals in America. With fries and soda, that single meal runs to about 2,500 calories.

Heart disease kills more than 600,000 Americans every year and is the leading cause of death. Excess weight, and diets heavy high in saturated fat, have long been identified as high risk factors for heart disease.

And sure, not everyone who consumes double cheeseburgers on a regular basis is going to have life-threatening health troubles. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they will. (Last month, John Alleman, a man who scoffed at the warnings about his favorite restaurant, the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, died of a heart attack. He was 52.)

“There’s a part of me that would love to offer health care to my employees,” said Ruffer, who is just one franchise owner and doesn’t speak for the entire chain. What he will have to give up to comply with the new law, he said, is about $60,000 a year in profits. But if you weigh that figure against the price of coronary heart disease, which costs the United States $109 billion a year in care, medication and lost productivity, it’s a pittance.

And in fact, after Ruffer went public with his whining, other Five Guys franchisees said they would work with the new law and offer insurance while still expanding their businesses. They shrugged off the fuss.

But the stage managers at the Heritage Foundation, and their acolytes in Congress, would have us believe that asking a business like Five Guys Burgers and Fries to pay for a small part of the problem that they helped to create makes them a victim. Gulp.