I am a small businessman and employer. I’ve hired various people for jobs as needed, and I work regularly with an excellent designer. But, I’ve been quite reluctant to take the next step and hire full-time employees. It isn’t that the payroll is that hard to do. QuickBooks takes care of that for me. The problem is that anyone I’d hire full-time would (rightly) expect that I’d provide a health insurance option.
I support a strong public healthcare option on extremely pragmatic reasoning, that it would benefit my bottom line, the bottom line of my employees, it would increase flexibility, freedom and responsiveness. Haha, I almost sound like I’m using “Randian” analysis here.
I’ve checked it out. I could get a decent insurance plan through Costco Small Business. But, the simple fact is that it is a huge hassle, and it has nothing to do with my business.
Yes, I could get group insurance once I had a pool of employees. But, it would require that I continue having these employees, since there is a minimum participation level. Also, it would hide benefits I am paying out. If I offer a programmer $40 per hour, that should be what they get For me to offer health insurance will either waste time for me, checking it out, administrating it, paying for part of it, documenting the options to my employees, or it will require me to hire someone else to do that for me. Either way, a waste of time, attention and money. All of that is hidden to my employees, who correctly see what I am paying them as the bottom line.
Employer based healthcare simply limits my options. Why should I care? Because it is traditional in the U.S.? Thanks but I’ll pass.
I believe that a viable, strong public healthcare option in the U.S. would lead to a huge growth in small business. We would be freed of an onerous, time-consuming, expensive task which has nothing to do with our core competency.
In my opinion as a small businessman, the reforms needed are simple and straightforward:
1) Remove all tax benefits for employer-based health insurance.
2) Remove the right of insurance companies to exclude pre-existing conditions and to exclude people based on “inaccurate information” once they contract an expensive disease (called “excission”, this is criminal, IMHO).
3) Require all citizens to buy insurance. Subsidize those who are too poor to pay for it.
If we did this, we would radically increase the flexibility of small business, and of the work force to move to the best available position. As it is, many people are simply trapped by the circumstances of their healthcare at a job which has long since ceased to be the right match for them. This benefits no one.
Technorati Tags: healthcare, socialized medicine, politics, uhc
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