A little over a month ago, the House Small Business Committee held a hearing to discuss Congressional efforts at health care reform, in search of bipartisan consensus on broad principles for said reform. Last week, the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship took its turn to host a roundtable to discuss small businesses and health care reform. Health care reform is one of those subjects on which everybody in Washington has an opinion and no two opinions are precisely alike. That no doubt explains why Senators plugging their favorite specific small business health care bill took up the first hour of this two hour event. The two bills in question were the SHOP Act (S. 979) and the Healthy Americans Act (S. 391). After Committee Ranking Member Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and former Chair Kit Bond (R-MO) had spent some time singing the praises of the former, and guest Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) had taken the opportunity to plug the latter, it was finally time to turn to the meat of the conversation.

And when they started talking during that final hour of the rountdable, what they said was neither new nor startling. What was both relatively new and reasonably startling was the amount of time and the number of firing neurons that were devoted to microbusinesses and, even more so, to nonemployer businesses. Most of the roundtable participants had something to say about microbusinesses, such as expressing concern about Congress making health care reform burdensome for the smallest firms and noting how important it is to ensure that nonemployers have a place in the conversation. It is both refreshing and encouraging to see microbusinesses and nonemployers get this much attention. At the same time, one is curious to see whether this sort of sensitivity to micros will either retain a place in the health care debate or translate to a similar sensitivity with respect to other small business issues.