Health care reform bill 101: What will it mean for business?

Maybe you own a dry cleaning shop. Or a restaurant. Or a small factory that makes, oh, bearings for wind turbines.

Maybe you’re the CEO of a larger firm – a utility, or a toolmaker, or even Google.

What would the health care reform bill mean for your business?

Quite a bit. It could affect business decisions on health coverage for employees at tens of thousands of firms.

Let’s start with a caveat: that dry cleaner, and probably the restaurant, might be too small to be affected by some of the most important business-related elements in the bill. Employers with 50 or fewer workers would be exempt from coverage provisions.

But for top executives at firms with 50 workers or more, the most important question may be this: would the health care reform bill require us to offer health insurance to our employees?

How does the bill work for businesses?

Here’s how that works: If you are a firm with more than 50 employees, and do not offer health insurance as a benefit, and at least one of your full-time employees gets a subsidy from the federal government to purchase health insurance on his or her own, you would have to pay Washington a fee of $2,000 for every one of your full-time workers. (Company accountants take note: you could subtract the first 30 of your employees from that assessment.)

Got that?

Also, even if you do offer coverage, you might have to take some extra action to help any of your low- or middle-income workers who want to buy insurance on their own.

Take an employee who makes less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level, which today is about $10,800 for an individual, or $22,000 for a family of four.

Perhaps that employee is finding firm-offered insurance expensive. If their share of health premiums is more than 8 percent of their income (but less than 9.8 percent), they would have the option of going out and buying insurance on their own through the new-fangled “exchange” marketplaces the health care reform bill would establish.

And you, as an employer, would have to help them. You’d have to provide them a “free choice voucher” equal to what the firm would have kicked in to provide coverage in the company plan.

When do the changes take effect?

All of the above changes would take effect beginning on Jan. 1, 2014.

One final item: if you’re a firm with more than 200 employees, and you do offer health insurance, you would have to automatically enroll your workers in the plan.

They could opt out of the coverage. But they are the ones that would have to make that decision.

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Source Link: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0321/Health-care-reform-bill-101-What-will-it-mean-for-business

HAPPY 8-YEAR ANNIVERSARY TO DERRICK LARANE!!!!!!!!

One of Local Wisdom’s founding fathers is celebrating 8 years of passionate dedication to his dream gig this month!

Please join me in a warm round of “Congratulatifications, Derrick!” on 8 years of  inspiring leadership

You Rock!

So as part of our continued growth, we are maintaining our commitment to acknowledging the valued efforts of all our employees.

Beginning this year, we will be acknowledging milestone anniversaries, namely the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 10th year of employee tenures, with a little something special   A small token of appreciation, a special LW Blog shout out and a whole lotta love!  LET’S GET STARTED, SHALL WE??!

We just wanted to take a moment and give the following LW employees an anniversary shout out:

Happy 1st Year Anniversary!

Eric Williamson,  1/19

RJay Haluko,  1/5

Happy 3rd Year Anniversary!

Joe Fonte,  2/1

Laurie Kathiari,  2/5

We value your hard work and dedication and are so happy you are a part of the LW Family.  We wouldn’t be where we are today without awesome employees like you!

xoxo

Anita Zinsmeister of the South Jersey Dale Carnegie Training left me a voicemail last week to attend a free intro class for Leadership Training for Managers (LTM). The 7 week (1 day a week) program covers: planning, decision making, time management, motivation, conflict resolution, and fostering innovation.

The group has an excellent ability to teach through games, simulations, and discussions. Derrick and I have taken the High Impact Presentation training. Well worth it.

If you want to check it out visit: http://southjersey.dalecarnegie.com

I’ve always wanted to attend, but wanted to get the other partners involved. It’s best we are on the same page. Needless to say we went yesterday and had a great time.

If you’ve taken the LTM class, I’d like to hear from you. We’re definately takeing the course, but probably not until next year first quarter. This time of the year is our most busiest.

Here are some notable quoatables from the intro class

You can only coast when your going downhill.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

Imperfect action always beats perfect inaction.

Only knowledge that gets used sticcks in the mind.

Bonus! Here’s DC’s 7 management diseases:

1. “We’ve never done it that way.”
2. “We’ve always done it this way.”
3. “If it’s not broken, why fix it?”
4. “We’ve tried that back in 1988 and it didn’t work.”
5. “it costs too much.”
6. “That’s not my job.”
7. “We’re just not ready for that just yet.”

Earlier last month Jakob Nielson posted his latest research findings on Social Networking on Intranets. Also always the study was quite thorough with case studies from 14 companies over 6 countries.

We work on a good number of Intranet sites for our customers and we find they are facing many of the same challenges.

Here are some notable quote-ables from the article.

When Intranet information architectures are structured according to the org chart, employees have a hard time finding their way around.

As people embrace social media in their private lives, they naturally expect to use similar tools within the enterprise

most companies are not very far along in a wholesale adoption of Web 2.0 technologies

Social software is not a trend that can be ignored. It’s affecting fundamental change in how people expect to communicate, both with each other and the companies they do business with.

successful social media initiatives at many companies emerged from underground, grassroots efforts

social software isn’t really about the tools. It’s about what the tools let users do and the business problems the tools address

So, rather than saying: “X is hot on the Web, let’s get it on the intranet,” say: “We need to accomplish Y; can X help us?”

void advertising the new tools as new tools. Instead, simply integrate them into the existing intranet, so that users encounter them naturally.

The tool itself is nothing; the value comes from the strength of its content.

Widespread use of internal social media breaks down communication barriers. That sounds good, but it can threaten people accustomed to having a monopoly on information and communication.

Corporate communications must adapt to social media’s real-time culture and become much more proactive than in the past

Before implementing intranet collaboration tools, you must consider company culture.

Things Take Time

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