Reform in Health Insurance for SMBs

Good news on structural assistance for small business — two days in a row? Can this be?

Yesterday, I reported on the possible thawing in the secondary market for a popular type of SBA loans to SMBs. Today, the news, as reported by BusinessWeek, is that there has been new bipartisan legislation introduced into the Senate called the Small Business Health Options Program (or SHOP).

SHOP contains several strong provisions that would make it easier, and more economical, for SMBs to provide health insurance for their employees. Because legislation is frequently complex, and because this is a blog focused on small business and media, I’m not going to get into the details of the proposed legislation, or try to quantify its impact on SMBs.

But the bigger picture is this: It’s likely that one of the upcoming reforms of the health-care system will deal specifically with SMBs.

This is good news, let’s hope, for all of us who care about SMBs and want to see their budgets freed up. Clearly, health-care costs have become highly burdensome on SMBs as a class, and are undoubtedly constraining all sorts of other spending — including  marketing and advertising.