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Own a Small Business? Brace for Obamacare Pain

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Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Local business owners might be hoping the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandates cover sticker shock.

The law’s employer coverage mandate doesn’t take effect until 2015, but early plan renewals are starting to roll in. And for some businesses, the premium jumps are positively painful.

Local insurance brokers are reporting spikes ranging from 35 percent to 120 percent on policies that renew from July to December. The increases are especially acute among employers with workforces made up of younger, healthier men. That’s because Obamacare prohibits offering lower rates to healthier groups. It also narrows the allowed premium gap between older and younger enrollees.

“It’s like if there were no more safe-driver discounts with State Farm,” said local insurance broker Frank Nolimal of Assurance Ltd. “Everybody has the same rate, whether you have three DUIs, or you’re a (nondrinking) churchgoing Mormon.”

The changes put as many as 90,000 policies across Nevada at risk of cancellation or nonrenewal this fall, said Las Vegas insurance broker William Wright, president of Chamber Insurance and Benefits. That’s more than three times the 25,000 enrollees affected in October, when Obamacare-compliant plans first hit the market.

Read more from this story HERE.

Small Businesses Claim U.S. Government Stealing their Ideas

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

“They stole all my stuff and used taxpayer money to do it,” John Hnatio, a Maryland small business owner, says of the U.S. government.

Hnatio claims the government has put his company, FoodquestTQ, nearly out of business by stealing his firm’s software that was designed to be licensed to the Food and Drug Administration to monitor food safety.

The FDA “took our ideas, plagiarized my doctoral dissertation on which a patent was based, and then they infringed on our patent. The result was that it decimated our business,” he adds.

Hnatio says his company has been left hanging by a thread. He has had to fire employees and says that the remaining three, including himself, are receiving no salary and have been forced to go on unemployment insurance.

“I have never seen anything like it,” says Hnatio, who is a retired federal government official.

Read more from this story HERE.

Small Businesses Next In Line to Lose Their Current Health Policies Under ObamaCare. Here’s Why…

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Photo Credit: ReutersPresident Obama’s simple line “If you like your current health plan you can keep it” is haunting him amidst reports that 3.5 million Americans who purchase health plans on their own, in the “individual” market, have lost that coverage as a result of Obamacare.

Very soon, small businesses will be faced with a similar fate.

They will also see their health plans canceled as a result of Obamacare.

Small businesses, with fewer than 50 employees, are not forced to provide coverage under Obamacare.

But when they do, policies sold in the small group market are subject to the same regulations now forcing the termination of millions of health plans sold directly to consumers.

Read more from this story HERE.

NBC: Small Business Owner’s Premiums Increase By 400% Under Obamacare (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube NBC’s Lisa Myers profiled several people who are receiving health plan cancellation letters due to Obamacare Tuesday.

For example, George Schwab of North Carolina, said he was “perfectly happy” with his plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield, which also insured his wife for a $228 monthly premium. But this past September, he was surprised to receive a letter saying his policy was no longer available.

Read more from this story HERE.

California Wants Small-Business Owners To Pay Back $120 Million In Tax Breaks (+video)

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Photo Credit: Prayitno

Photo Credit: Prayitno

Small-business investors in California were promised big breaks five years ago, but now they’re being told to pay up, instead after a court ruling.

After following the law, many of them are getting hit with tax bills as high as $250,000.

“When we make a promise, we have to uphold it,” said Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Redondo Beach.

But that is not what the state government appears to be doing. Small-business owners are getting hefty tax breaks for tax credits they already got five years ago.

“They relied on California law as it was written, that they would get a tax break if they invested in certain kinds of businesses,” Lieu said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Critics Question IRS Initiative Targeting Small Businesses

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsSmall business owners across the country are receiving letters from the IRS questioning if they are reporting all of their cash income, in a new push by the agency some are saying could unnecessarily create fear in the small business community.

The Wall Street Journal reports the initiative is an attempt to respond to what the agency feels is a widespread failure by small businesses to report all their cash sales.

The agency says the letters are not the same as an audit, and it is simply seeking more tax information from the businesses. However, some lawmakers and business owners who received the letters say the initiative is alarming.

“There’s an emotional thing when you get a pretty ominous-looking letter from the IRS, [saying] you might have done some bad things,” small business owner Tom Reese tells the Wall Street Journal. “I really work hard with my accountant to make sure that I not only follow the law, but follow the letter of the law.”

One letter the IRS sent is headlined, “Notification of Possible Income Underreporting.” It notifies the business owner “your gross receipts may be underreported” and says they must complete a form “to explain why the portion of your gross receipts from non-card payments appears unusually low.”

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Video: Home Depot Co-founder: Obamacare Will ‘Kill Off’ Small Business, Gov't is the 'Villain'

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Photo Credit: daysofthundr46

Retired Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus declared to Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview that “Obamacare is going to kill off small business.”

“If [employees] are thrown out of their medical plans now, where they’re covered in a good plan and thrown under the bus, they’re going to be destroyed,” Marcus said on Thursday. “If, in fact, they don’t stay as full-time employees but go to part-time employees, they’re going to be destroyed…

“People have to understand that the villain is not their employer; the villain is the U.S. government,” Marcus added. “Obamacare is the capper. That’s the bullet to the temple.”

Watch video here:

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Geithner: Taxes on ‘Small Business’ Must Rise So Government Doesn’t ‘Shrink’

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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.”

The administration’s plan to raise the tax rate on small businesses is part of its plan to raise taxes on all Americans who make more than $250,000 per year—including businesses that file taxes the same way individuals and families do.

Geithner’s explanation of the administration’s small-business tax plan came in an exchange with first-term Rep. Renee Ellmers (R.-N.C.). Ellmers, a nurse, decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 after she became active in the grass-roots opposition to President Barack Obama’s proposed health-care reform plan in 2009.

“Overwhelmingly, the businesses back home and across the country continue to tell us that regulation, lack of access to capital, taxation, fear of taxation, and just the overwhelming uncertainties that our businesses face is keeping them from hiring,” Ellmers told Geithner. “They just simply cannot.”

She then challenged Geithner on the administration’s tax plan.

Read More at CNS News By Terence P. Jeffrey, CNS News