In this first of what hopefully will be many monthly web columns, I thought I’d take time to introduce myself and tell you about what you can expect to read here in the months to come.
My name is Greg Howard. I am a lifelong entrepreneur and small business owner, so I’m one of you. I am also an insurance broker licensed in eight states, a federally certified Affordable Care Act specialist and a federally certified SHOP (Small Business Health Options Program) specialist. All of that, and $5 will get you a latte at Starbucks unless they’ve raised their prices again.
With the launch of this new column, my team and I are going to provide you with a boots-on-the-ground look at the Affordable Care Act. By taking the politics out of the health care debate, we’ll do our best to provide you with an unbiased look at the good, the bad and the ugly, based on our day-to-day experience with Healthcare.gov, navigators, insurance companies and our clients.
The Affordable Care Act, often known as Obamacare, is not nearly as good as Sen. Harry Reid or President Barack Obama would like people to believe. The website is still very fragile, many functions that people need still don’t work, and it is, by all independent accounts, not a safe environment for people’s personal financial information. There are still substantial communication problems in the background between healthcare.gov and the insurance companies. Some states have even abandoned their exchange sites altogether in favor of paper applications, simply to get something done.
On the other hand, it is not nearly as bad as Rush or Fox News would have us believe. Claims of huge increases in deductibles, people being dropped with nowhere to go, massive increases in premiums both for private and group health plans, while true to some extent, are mitigated by subsidies and new approaches to group health insurance that were not available previously. If you understand the law as it is written and currently being interpreted, it can be of real benefit to employees and employers alike.
We’ll take a look at the law from the small business owner’s perspective—how it can be used to provide quality health coverage for the employees while at that same time lowering employers’ health insurance costs.
We’ll look at what some of the big boys like IBM, GE, Time Warner, Sears, Walgreens and host of other large employers are doing to use the law to their advantage and how those principles might be employed by the small business community.
Over the next few months, we will go into much greater detail about all of these topics and more to help you understand how the law applies to you, your family, your employees and your business. We’ll examine specific examples of real-world applications that in most cases will surprise and encourage you.
Whatever your politics, the Affordable Care Act is the law we have. It is a tax law, just like the myriad of other tax laws that affect our businesses every year. And until it changes, which it undoubtedly will, it behooves all of as small business owners to understand it and use it to the best of our ability to the benefit our employees, our partners, our stakeholders, our families and our businesses.
We’ll do our best to provide some insights into how to do that. So stay tuned!
