Health Costs Are Crushing Small Businesses
Oct 19th, 2009 | By Dawn R. Rivers | Category: Politics & PolicyAs you know, I don’t normally provide an unfettered platform for politicians like this but I thought this op-ed from Chairwoman Landrieu (which originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal) was timely, since she will convene a hearing on health care reform and small businesses later this week. This is another instance in which terminology gets in the way. Where the Chairwoman refers to ‘sole proprietorships,’ I believe she actually means nonemployer businesses. It would make sense of the rest of her remarks in context, at any rate.
It is gratifying that Landrieu remembers nonemployers, particularly at a time when everybody is moaning about lack of job creation and ignoring the self-created jobs of said nonemployers. I continue to hope that somebody in Washington will ‘get’ that connection sometime during my lifetime. In fact, Chairwoman Landrieu discusses microbusinesses quite a lot in this piece, even if she doesn’t actually call them microbusinesses. Proper nomenclature is, I suppose, a luxury that one should not reasonably expect at this stage of the game. That microbusinesses are being discussed at all, and that their challenges have garnered somebody’s attention, is an important step forward.
