More Small Businesses Offering Health Care To Employees Thanks To 'Obamacare'

From Forbes we learn:

"The first statistics are coming in and, to the surprise of a great many, Obamacare might just be working to bring health care to working Americans precisely as promised.

The major health insurance companies around the country are reporting a significant increase in small businesses offering health care benefits to their employees.

Why?

Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working."

Entrepreneurs complain of prohibitive health care costs

A recent study on the small business sectors in different countries has knocked down the notion that the U.S. economic policy welcomes and fosters entrepreneurs. Rather, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which conducted the study, found that the United States has one the smallest small business sectors—as a portion of total national employment—in the world.

The study looked at 22 wealthy industrialized nations and found that the United States had the second lowest share of self-employed workers, ahead of only Luxembourg. The United States also ranked close to the bottom in terms of the portion of the work force employed in small business manufacturing: the U.S. share of 11.1% compares with 14.4% in Sweden and 18.1% in the United Kingdom

In other words, despite a long tradition of celebrating self-starters and business owners who create jobs and collectively serve as a powerful economic engine, the United States has a comparatively weak and small business sector.

While the study’s authors theorize that high health costs are to blame for the lack of a more robust small business sector, what’s even more striking is how many would-be entrepreneurs agreed. A New York Times blog earlier this month about the study generated a flurry of responses, which were overwhelmingly in agreement that unfriendly health care policies were choking the small business sector.

Read it all at the Economic Policy Institute

Barack Obama Weekly Address: Health Insurance Reform, Small Business and Your Questions

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Small business owner discusses the need for health reform

Mike Draper, owner of SMASH of Des Moines, IA, testifies before the House Ways and Means Committee on how the cost of health care is affecting his small business, and his support for the choice of a public health insurance option.

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Regional lawmakers, doctors join campaign supporting a public-health plan

Pushing back against Republican attacks on President Obama's vision of a public health plan, a nationwide coalition of state lawmakers, small-business owners, physicians, community groups and others Wednesday launched a public-relations campaign aimed at building support for an option they believe is essential for meaningful health reform.

Read More at the Seattle Times

Will WellPoint support any reform?

The insurance industry’s offer to agree to guaranteed issue in the individual market is dependent on a mandate to require every uninsured individual to purchase insurance. That would distribute risk broadly even if it doesn’t specify how such coverage could be paid for. Guaranteed issue has been opposed by WellPoint since it is not compatible with its business strategy of selling only to the healthy.

What about guaranteed issue in the small-business market? Since current proposals also would permit the continuation of the employer-sponsored market, insurers such as WellPoint would remain successful only if they could continue to use underwriting and premium flexibility in the small-business market. If they were required to issue coverage to every small business that applied, then they would have to have a mandate for all small businesses to purchase coverage. Though that would distribute risk more evenly in the small-business market, it still would defeat WellPoint’s successful strategy of keeping premiums competitive by selling their products to healthy individuals and only to small businesses with healthy employees.

WellPoint worked very hard to defeat reform efforts in California since it would have destroyed its dominance as the insurer of the healthy. There is every reason to believe that WellPoint likewise will oppose reform on a national level if Congress includes measures that would require private insurers to participate in a regulated social insurance program.

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Amid Slump, Small Businesses Consider Cutting Medical Coverage

Accelerating health-care premiums and sharp revenue shortfalls due to the recession are forcing some small companies to choose between dropping health insurance or laying off workers -- or staying in business at all.

Read More at WSJ.com: