Small Business & Health Care
Today's New York Times features an article called " Small Business is Latest Focus in Health Fight ". It focuses on the efforts of individual states around the U.S. in helping small business employers to provide health care to their workers. (New York isn't mentioned by name, though.) Two sentences jumped out at me: 1) "Of the 47 million uninsured people in this country, at least 20 million are employed by small businesses or work for themselves — a figure that has increased by an average of more than 500,000 a year since 2000." 2) "State laws now typically make it impossible for businesses to cross state lines to create their own purchasing pools, and small companies have had little success to date in being able to band together in sufficient numbers within state borders." Regarding the latter, Federal legislation has been introduced that would ease restrictions on small business' forming pools, even across state lines. The National Federatio...