miércoles, 22 de enero de 2014

Plan del Senado para Matar la Administración de Pequeños Negocios (BusinessWeek)

Policy

Explaining the Senate Plan to Kill the Small Business Administration

Burr talking to the media on Capitol Hill

Photograph by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Burr talking to the media on Capitol Hill

Last month, Senator Richard Burr, (R-N.C.) introduced a bill that would combine the U.S. Commerce and Labor departments and eliminate the Small Business Administration as a stand-alone agency. Under other circumstances, a proposal to pare government by a Republican lawmaker might seem like political grandstanding, at least while a Democrat sits in the White House. But Burr’s proposal has been getting good circulation in small business advocacy circles, perhaps because it bears similarities to a plan floated by President Obama in 2012 to combine overlapping agencies. Here’s what to know about the bill.
Why would anyone want to get rid of the Small Business Administration?
The bill appears to be driven by the goal of eliminating duplicate efforts by the Commerce and Labor departments. Burr isn’t proposing to kill the SBA but to transform it from a stand-alone agency into an arm of a newly created Department of Commerce and the Workforce. In that scenario, the head of the SBA would be an undersecretary, according to an organizational chart (PDF) on Burr’s website. Presumably, the SBA would continue to perform its core function of guaranteeingsmall business loans from within the Commerce-Labor hybrid. Streamlining programs in other areas—exporting, for instance—in which multiple agencies provide similar support could help small businesses by making government bureaucracy easier to navigate.
So they don’t want to kill the SBA. How is trading a cabinet level administrator for an undersecretary a good deal for small business?
Good point. National Small Business Association President Todd McCracken toldInc. that having an SBA chief who can speak on behalf of small business owners’ interests is a key benefit of having a stand-alone organization. A Burr spokesman told McClatchy that putting an undersecretary in charge would actually elevate the SBA within the executive branch. That makes the SBA’s current acting administrator, Jeanne Hulit, sound like a big fish in a small ocean.
So it might be better if the SBA boss were a smaller fish in a more powerful organization?
That’s the argument. By the way, did you know the Commerce Department housed the National Aquarium for decades?
How are other advocacy groups reacting?
Consolidation would create additional layers of red tape for the SBA’s loan programs, says Beth Solomon, chief executive officer of the National Association of Development Companies, an umbrella organization for SBA lenders. That could undo gains in small business lending made during the Obama administration.
The National Federation of Independent Business hasn’t taken a position on reorganization but would like to see the SBA’s Office of Advocacy preserved. That’s because Advocacy has the power to prevent new federal regulations that overburden small business under the Regulatory Flexibility Act, spokeswoman Jean Card says in an e-mail.
What do the politicians say?
Neither Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who chairs the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, nor Sam Graves (R-Mo.), who heads the House Committee on Small Business, responded to requests for comment. The matter is complicated by speculation that Landrieu could soon be named chair of the Senate’s energy committee, creating a vacancy.
A more important question: Why would Obama let a Republican senator take credit for consolidation? Landrieu and fellow Democratic committee members Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) are up for reelection, and folding the SBA is unlikely to help any of their campaigns. That’s to say nothing of the lesser political squabbles over just what inefficiencies would be streamlined.
You ’re not making it sound very likely to happen. Why are people talking about it?
Eliminating or deemphasizing the SBA can be a tough political sell, as President Ronald Reagan discovered from a failed attempt to shutter the agency. Burr’s plan is getting attention now for two big reasons: Obama proposed merging the SBA with the Commerce Department and several other agencies back in 2012. That gives Burr’s proposal a bipartisan feel, even though its cosponsors are all Republicans. Beyond that, it’s worth noting that Obama has yet to nominate a successor to Karen Mills, who announced her resignation last February and left the administration in August for a role at Harvard University. As long as the SBA is led by an acting chief, there will be speculation in some quarters that its days as a stand-alone agency are limited.
So if Obama were to nominate someone, talk about getting rid of the SBA would go away?
Probably. The White House hasn’t responded to a request for comment on the search for a new SBA chief.
Clark is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek covering small business and entrepreneurship.

viernes, 10 de enero de 2014

Consejos que los Pequeños Negocios quizás ignoren...(BusinessWeek)

2014

New Year's Advice Small Business Can Ignore

The dawning of the New Year is an advice maven’s favorite time. The Internet is awash with helpful tips for small business owners. What should Main Street make of the annual flood of articles prescribing New Year’s resolutions to small business owners? Here’s some, er, advice.
It’s hard to go wrong with the easily achievable resolutions offered by the National Federation of Independent Business, which suggest that the New Year is a good time for routine maintenance. It shouldn’t take much time to make sure insurance coverage, corporate records, or employee documents are up to date. You might as well schedule a dental cleaning and get an oil change while you’re at it.
Meanwhile, it’s a good idea to rethink your website, or conduct a cybersecurity audit, but keep perspective. You won’t suddenly have more time to increase your social media presence when the calendar turns. It’s worth noting that many of the experts dispensing resolutions at this time of year are entrepreneurs hoping to promote their services. And research has shown that January is actually the worst month to try to change your behavior. (You’d be better off in August.)
The point isn’t to ignore the need to work on your business, but that there’s no reason to turn your resolutions into a list of tasks you don’t have time or money to complete. Along those lines, the Shreveport Times has a nice piece on 10 local business owners. Not one resolved to figure out mobile payments, or to use data to better understand their business.
Instead, they used the call for resolutions to reaffirm customer-friendly values. Eddie Brumfield, who owns computer troubleshooting business Jace Consulting, offered an idea that should resonate with business owners everywhere: “Operate with a lot of integrity, treat people right and keep my prices reasonable.”
Clark is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek covering small business and entrepreneurship.

Small Businesses Weigh Sending Sick Workers to Obamacare Exchanges (BusinessWeek)


Small Businesses Weigh Sending Sick Workers to Obamacare Exchanges


Can an employer pay chronically ill workers to leave the company health plan and get insurance somewhere else? That’s a question some business owners are asking, now that no one can be turned away from individual health plans under Obamacare.
The potential loophole in the Affordable Care Act could threaten the viability of Obamacare marketplaces if they get the most expensive-to-insure workers while companies keep healthier employees on their own plans. Some mid-sized companies that self-insure—that is, they pay the cost of employees’ medical claims directly—are at least talking about the idea.
“A handful of our clients, mostly in the 100- to 1,000-employee self-insurance market, have independently inquired about this and sought out legal counsel on the question,” says Richard E. Twietmeyer, executive vice president in charge of employee benefits at M3, a Madison (Wisc.)-based insurance brokerage. “It’s not something I’m suggesting.”
One possible roadblock: Such a practice may be illegal, and it might leave business owners open to employment discrimination claims, says John L. Barlament, an attorney at the law firm of Quarles & Brady in Milwaukee. Nevertheless, he says he has had “multiple conversations” with business owners and insurance brokers interested in pursuing this option.
The Affordable Care Act prompted predictions that many employers would drop coverage entirely and send all their workers to the exchanges. That hasn’t happened yet. If companies shift only their sickest employees into marketplace coverage, the practice could damage the marketplaces, which depend on premiums from younger, healthier participants to help cover the costs of older, sicker members. “I don’t believe the architects of the ACA set out for this to happen,” Twietmeyer says. “If employer groups have the opportunity to carve out high-cost claimants, that would accelerate the death spiral of the exchanges, because they won’t be able to balance the risk.”
There were “anti-dumping” provisions in the Affordable Care Act that prohibited employers from pushing sick employees into high-risk insurance pools that were created to cover individuals with preexisting health conditions until exchange coverage became available this year. But those provisions were not carried through into the rules governing exchange coverage. “It’s almost like they forgot to include that clause on the exchange side of the equation,” Barlament says.
A spokesman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is running the federal marketplace, pointed to an existing law that governs employer health-care and pension benefits, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. While that law does bar employers from discriminating in how they offer workers benefits, it doesn’t address a situation in which an employee and an employer come to an agreement that the worker voluntarily decline coverage in favor of a better deal on the exchanges, subsidized with a cash benefit from the employer.
The fact that companies are even savvy enough to ask about this possibility reflects how much executives have grappled with the rising costs of medical insurance over the past decade, Twietmeyer says.
Many of his clients are family-owned manufacturing companies in the Midwest whose employee benefit costs are now second only to salaries as the biggest expense. Because it can be cheaper, about 65 percent of them opt to self-insure. This means they set aside funds to pay their employees’ medical costs directly, rather than buy a group policy from a large insurance company.
The detailed data on employee health claims that they get by self-insuring has prompted many of them to adopt wellness policies and take additional steps to drive down costs, Twietmeyer says. “When you’re self-insured, you get a look at a thorough spectrum of what is driving the cost factors for your business,” he says.
Employees with chronic conditions such as hemophilia, or those who develop serious illnesses like cancer, can cost a self-insured company a great deal annually and make them less attractive when they are shopping for “stop-loss” policies, he says. Those policies are typically used to backstop self-insured businesses; they pay the employer if workers’ health costs hit a certain level.
Darrell Moon, chief executive of Orriant, a Salt Lake City-based business that advises companies on how to cut their health-care costs, says clients haven’t asked him about shifting their most costly employees to the exchanges. “To say you would pay them to not even get their insurance through you—that’s kind of scary because it smacks of discrimination,” Moon says. “You’d have to have a pretty good attorney to pull that off.”
It is not clear that any businesses have done this yet, but Barlament says he has advised clients who are willing to take the risk that they should make sure their employees will receive better coverage on the marketplaces than they would on the job.
The idea would be to offer employees incentives for declining company coverage, not to force them off the company plan or penalize them for staying on it, both actions that would violate established law. He says he “wouldn’t be shocked at all” if some employers try it next year. “Once [the Obamacare marketplaces] really get rolling, I could definitely see this happening in 2015.”
Karen_klein
Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.