Free-Reprint Article Written by: Melissa Mashtonio See Terms of Reprint Below.
***************************************************************** * * This email is being delivered directly to members of the group: * * [email protected] * ***************************************************************** We have moved our TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article. Be certain to read our TERMS OF REPRINT and honor our TERMS OF REPRINT when you use this article. Thank you. This article has been distributed by: http://Article-Distribution.com Helpful Link: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Overview http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Article Title: ============== Small Business Health Insurance: Escaping the Catch-22 Article Description: ==================== As the economy continues to tank so do the number of Americans without health insuranceand the number small business owners who can afford to insure their employees. Additional Article Information: =============================== 780 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line Distribution Date and Time: 2008-05-29 11:12:00 Written By: Melissa Mashtonio Copyright: 2008 Contact Email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For more free-reprint articles by Melissa Mashtonio, please visit: http://www.thePhantomWriters.com/recent/author/melissa-mashtonio.html ============================================= Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters: ============================================= If you use this article on your website or in your ezine, We Want To Know About It. Use the following URL to let us know where you have used this article, and we will include a link to your website on thePhantomWriters.com: http://thephantomwriters.com/notify.php?id=6087&p=load HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of Article Are Available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/m/small-business-health-insurance.shtml#get_code --------------------------------------------------------------------- Small Business Health Insurance: Escaping the Catch-22 Copyright (c) 2008 Melissa Mashtonio Manta http://www.manta.com As the economy continues to tank so do the number of Americans without health insuranceand the number small business owners who can afford to insure their employees. A recent survey by the NFIB Research Foundation, a small business advocacy group, showed that only 47 percent of small business owners offer employee health benefits. Those employing 20 or more people are more than twice as likely to offer employee health benefits as those with fewer than 10. The survey found that the low numbers are primarily the result of new small businesses opting not to cover employees. Most small businesses who offer benefits have offered them for a while and are reluctant to drop them for fear of losing good employees. Its much better for employee morale if a small-business owner never offers health benefits, than it is to offer them and then be forced to take it away because it is too expensive to continue, said William J. Dennis, NFIBs senior research fellow. Small-business owners experience considerable turmoil in their early years. They often experience cash flow problems and are reluctant to incur additional expenses such as health insurance. Whats new to this picture is that it appears that new small-business owners are waiting longer or choosing not to offer health insurance benefits to their employees at all. The fact that new small businesses are choosing not to offer benefits is a disturbing trend because of the swift turnover of the small business population. If the trend continues, the number of employers who never offer benefits will increase. And that will hurt small businesses because it will limit thet talent pool from which they draw. What Can Be Done? Small businesses arent alone in struggling with the cost of health care (and premiums) in the current economic climate. The U.S. Census Bureau reports 47 million people, or 15.8 percent of the U.S. population, were without health insurance during 2006 Unfortunately for the small business owner, new legislative approaches to help the uninsured may actually hurt them. One popular option is the "pay-or-play" mandate, in which employers are required to either provide health insurance for their employees or pay a penalty to offset costs the government incurs to provide health care for the uninsured. The rules likely would only apply to full-time employees. Proponents say such mandates could significantly reduce the ranks of the uninsured, since the vast majority of the uninsured are in families with at least one full-time worker. Many of these are low-income families, suggesting that such measures could benefit the working poor. Opponents argue that many low-wage workers will just be paid less, reduced to part-time or laid off to offset the insurance costs. In their paper, "Employer Health Insurance Mandates and the Risk of Unemployment," researchers Katherine Baicker and Helen Levy found several factors affect the extent to which such mandates cost more jobs: * Cost of the insurance. * How much of the cost of coverage will be passed on to workers via lower wages. * How many uninsured workers have earnings so close to the minimum wage that their wages cannot be reduced enough to offset the cost of the new coverage. The authors found that the mandate would still leave 54 percent of American workers without coverage. The vast majority of those who benefit from pay or play mandate live in families with incomes twice the poverty line or more and, depending on how coverage is determined, the mandate will leave a significant share of the working poor ineligible for such benefits either because their hourly wage rate is too high or they work for smaller exempt firms, the authors wrote. Most experts agree that such mandates are bad for small businesses. Employers are faced with hard choices. In the NFIB poll, only 20 percent of small employers said they would simply provide the insurance as required. Many more said they would either cut jobs or move more employees to part-time status. Moving people to part-time work is a particularly attractive option to small business owners. In fact, how part-time employees are treated is a key influencing factor on whether small businesses support pay or play legislation. According to NFIB, The treatment of these employees will alter relative costs in one direction or the other, providing small employers strong relative incentive to change. Small business experts agree that if part-time employees are covered by a mandate, most employers will respond by simply eliminating jobs, adding to the jobless rate and doing nothing for the rate of uninsured. Small business owners have always faced an uncertain future but the current economy and the health care crisis make this an extremely tough time to take the startup step. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Melissa Mashtonio writes for http://www.manta.com/ the authority for finding 45 million free small to large company profiles worldwide-and their related industries and products. Mantas Small Business Center features thousands of how-to-guides for small business owners. --- END ARTICLE --- Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/m/small-business-health-insurance.shtml#get_code ..................................... TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules (Last Updated: May 11, 2006) Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR: ..................................... *** Digital Reprint Rights *** * If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog, You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as Hyperlinks (clickable links). * Links must remain in the form that we published them. Clean links should point to the Author's links without redirects having been inserted into the copy. * You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks must be retained with articles. You can change where the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do. * Email Distribution of this article Must be done through Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email. * You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display of the article in your website or in your ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests within the article. * You may not use sentences from this article as an input for any software that steals sentences from others in order to build an article with software. The copyright on this article applies to the "WHOLE" article. *** Author Notification *** We ask that you notify the author of publication of his or her work. Melissa Mashtonio can be reached at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** Print Publication Reprint Rights *** If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT publication, you must contact the author directly for Print Permission at: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ..................................... If you need help converting this text article for proper hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl ===================================================================== ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION http://thePhantomWriters.com is a paid article distribution service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com are owned and operated by Bill Platt of Stillwater, Oklahoma USA. The content of this article is solely the property and opinion of its author, Melissa Mashtonio http://www.manta.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX --------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------ *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* To have your article appear in this distribution list, you must absolutely be a client of thePhantomWriters. We offer a paid article distribution service, and this is one of the more than 60 groups where we submit our client articles. To learn more about our program, visit: http://thePhantomWriters.com/x.pl/tpw/index.htmYahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thePhantomWriters/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thePhantomWriters/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
