Health care reform: what matters most to micros?

Posted on | June 2, 2009 | 2 Comments

It seemed for awhile there that the hot political topic for the foreseeable future would be health care reform.

Of course, that hot-topicness has since been hijacked by Judge Sotomayor and Dr. Tiller and General Motors — which, now that I stop to think about it, would have been pretty slick if I thought somebody had done it on purpose. It was pretty clear which way the wind was blowing and that the scare tactics were ready to be unveiled without further ado. What better way to take the wind out of the sails of the nay-sayers than to change the subject?

Still, President Obama seems determined to deal with it this year — in spite of the fact that whenever Democrats get anything like serious about it, the conservative punditry does its best to turn the issue from “something everybody says must be done right now” to something so politically toxic that nobody wants to touch it.

Regardless of whether it is a hot political topic or a radioactive political topic, one set of people that hasn’t stopped talking about it for a couple of decades now are small business owners and their advocates.

And microbusinesses are particularly hard hit in two ways.

• Microbusiness employers, because their firms are so very small, get punished most severely when it comes to premium costs and fickle insurers.
• And, because the individual market is such a mess, nonemployers (who comprise the largest segment of the U.S. business population) are just generally screwed.

All of which has inspired this month’s poll, to be found over there in the sidebar. Nice long list of choices and I’d be very interested in finding out what you care about most when it comes to reform.

If Congress doesn’t do anything else, which item on the list do you think they just have to do, and do right?

And, of course, if you are inclined to vote for “Other”, please drop a comment below and tell me what I left off the list! While you’re at it, feel free to stop in and tell us your microbusiness health insurance horror story.

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