After all the drama surrounding the down-to-the-wire Senate health care reform bill, which was finally passed on Christmas Eve, 2009, it’s a bit anticlimactic to have to report that President Obama is still having to urge Senate Democrats to ‘finish the job.’ There remain enough differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill [...]

In case you were wondering, the health care reform bill currently being negotiated between the House and the Senate will almost certainly be useless for the majority of microbusinesses. There are a few good things the bill accomplishes. For example, it prohibits insurance companies from denying insurance to prospective purchasers on the basis of pre-existing [...]

Truth to tell, everybody set about health care reform in the wrong way. In a more just universe, small business owners would have had the earliest and most influential input as policy makers were making policy.

As a group, they were yelling for reform first and most consistently. A few years ago, those in the know were saying that health care reform was “essentially a small business issue.”

That was before the insurance industry lobbyists stepped in and started throwing their weight around.

Now, it is entirely possible that another hearing before another committee would have produced the sorts of witnesses who would have gratified that particular questioner with answers that reinforced his pre-existing ideas.

If you watch enough of these hearings, you see it fairly frequently. The Committee Member will question their own witness or someone who they can tell from prepared testimony already agrees with them. They will phrase questions in such a way as to get the witness to make their favorite points for them. It is all for the sake of the record.

But we have to be glad that didn’t happen in this case, because nobody learns anything that way, do they?

In its way, it’s kind of funny that so many members of Congress have suddenly become indignant about the plight of small businesses in the health insurance marketplace when the small business owners themselves (as well as both Small Business Committees) have been jumping up and down and yelling about that very thing for decades. [...]

The National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE) hosted two teleconferences last week to instruct reporters on what the self-employed can expect in a post health-care reform world and the picture was not necessarily pretty. According to the NASE’s Kristie Arslan, executive director of the organization’s legislative office, there are several matters in the health care [...]

As 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 [...]

President Obama, hailed back in February as a savior simply because he was ‘saving’ us from a bad case of Bush Fatigue, is now learning what it’s like when the honeymoon is over.

He certainly deserves credit for refusing to do what his predecessors have done: take one look at health care reform and run screaming from the room. This has to be one of the most thankless tasks in the universe.

Various groups complain and release studies and demand action. Then, when some brave politician comes along and proposes said action, people see change bearing down on them, freak out, and then they run screaming from the room.

The President was going to give a major speech on health care reform to a joint session of Congress. This is something that doesn’t usually happen beyond the annual State of the Union Address. Said the White House Press Office, ‘Let there by hype.’ And there was hype. In the end, the Great Speech got [...]

The National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE) is getting a little hot under the collar about proposals for health care reform. Or, to be more specific, they are perturbed by the lack of help for the self-employed to be found in those proposals. Although policy makers understand that small business stakeholders are deeply engaged here, [...]