As a small business owner, this “Health Care Reform” nonsense makes me cringe & uncontrollably start muttering things under my breath. While I won’t get nailed with this at the moment, it’s not hard to see what will happen for many small businesses.

It’s really quite simple actually:

1. Small businesses will hire fewer employees. We’re seeing this already all over the place due to the economy.  Less money equals less jobs. So sure, let’s keep that unemployment ball rolling along.
    
2. Employees will be offered crappy insurance coverage and/or pay through the nose to have it. Anyone who has worked for a small business probably has seen this already. Yes, there is insurance available, but if you’re in need of family coverage you’re probably going to get hosed with the cost of this.  And many will opt to not take the coverage as taking the risk and paying for doctor visits out of pocket looks to be cheaper (I have seen this in very large corporations as well).  So how is that helping the health insurance situation?

Anyway, if they do pass this it’s going to be interesting to watch as they begin to see this work itself out on paper. “What do you mean we’ve poured all of this money into it and we haven’t helped matters? Go fix the numbers and don’t come back until you do. In the meantime, lets raise taxes some more to cover it.”

I know that those two predictions will anger some people, but I don’t see how health care can truly be reformed until we get to the source of the problem; the insurance companies.  While I hate the government meddling in things like this, if all of the people who voted for this administration really want the governments’ help in the matter, how about having them require insurance companies to offer the same policy to everyone for the same price, regardless of the size of your company.  Yes, there are still some flaws in that (like, dare I say it, the portion paid by the employer), but at least it’s a start.

Am I wrong? Let me know your thoughts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 11:50 pm and is filed under Business, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.