Hi Ptanner, imagine if Cigna had dropped Intel when Grove had cancer?
Yes, that's what the Republican Party essentially advocated. I am not kidding. It's absolutely pathetic. And then they wonder why startups and small businesses, as a whole, dislike the Republican Party so much?
The Dems fought the Republicans so hard on this issue.
I could go on and on about the disgusting positions that the Republican Party has taken on health care for startups, but it would take so long to write. I'll simply summarize a few of them.
The Republican Party allowed health care insurance companies to do the following misdeeds:
- allowing health insurance companies to not give health insurance to startups
- allowing health insurance companies to raise the premiums by 1000% as a way to force a targeted startup into bankruptcy (and thus, the startup they target is forced to drop the plan). (there are horror stories from the early 90's about good startups filing for bankruptcy because they were targeted by health insurance companies!)
- allowing health insurance companies to not give diabetes coverage even though it costs only a matter of a few cents/employee (and the cost can be passed to the startups, so this is a no brainer!!!)
- allowing health insurance companies to not adequately disclose that diabetes is not covered
- allowing health insurance companies to drop a startup if one employee gets cancer (i.e. completely removing the company's health care plan)
- allowing health insurance companies to not give coverage to heart attack victims (no kidding - one startup had a plan that unknowingly had heart attacks excluded in the fine print of the plan. Unfortunately, one of their sales person - with no pre-existing condition- had a heart attack one day and...got no care...courtesy of the Republican Party's positions.)
- allowing health insurance companies to not provide documentation to startups that discloses the details of their plan's coverage
- allowing health insurance companies to not give any coverage to a new employee (i.e. a startup can have a plan, but there's no guarantee a new hire will get accepted by the health care company!!!)
Until April of 2000, anyone I hired, I had to say, "I cannot guarantee we can provide you health insurance until the health insurance company accepts you and this process may take them several weeks, and there is no guarantee they will accept you at all."
This is what all startups had to say until April 2000 !!! (Imagine if a new employee wasn't accepted on the plan, had quit their previous job, and were caught in limbo land with no plan!)
Fortunately, on April 2000, the law changed (thanks to the Democrats!!!) and the following occurred:
- health insurance companies are now federally mandated to give health care to startups and can no longer deny coverage to a new employee (Go Democrats!!!)
- health insurance companies are now federally mandated to provide coverage for diabetes (Go Democrats!!!). (The extra cost of this was passed equally to all businesses, and was a matter of only a few cents - a no brainer!)
The Republican Party's positions are hostile to startups and they frankly are bad for you and your business. Their positions make absolutely no business sense at all, going counter to the productivity that startups offer to the US growth.
The Republican Party's positions are *bad* for startups and small businesses.
Regards,
Amy J |
