Curious Jimbeau

At HotClickVideo Worldwide, Inc. we use Bryson Financial Group for our company insurance.  They supplied this brief about what changes small business owners should expect from new health care legislation.  Here are the bullet points:
Although the reform package has yet to be finalized, major changes are looming. Some of the package’s provisions that will affect employers include:

Employer Mandates. Effective in 2014, most employers with 50 or more employees must offer coverage to employees. Employers who do not do so may be subject to hefty penalties. The benefit plans offered will also have to meet certain requirements.

Individual Mandates. Citizens and legal residents will be required to have a certain level of health coverage, or pay a tax penalty. These rules could restrict the usage of high deductible health plans and will decrease the chance that your employees will decline coverage under your plan.

Coverage Subsidies. Small employers that provide health insurance for employees will be eligible for a tax credit. Also, employers who provide insurance to retirees over age 55 who are not eligible for Medicare are eligible for a temporary reinsurance program.

Health Benefit Exchanges. In 2014, state exchanges will be established for small businesses and individuals to shop for health insurance. Larger businesses will be able purchase coverage in the exchanges in the future.

Insurance Reforms. These reforms require policies to provide dependent coverage for children through age 26. They prohibit lifetime coverage limits, rescission of coverage except in cases of fraud, and imposing pre-existing condition exclusions on children. Many of these provisions will take effect in 2010. They may affect your benefits and how you administer your benefit programs.
The health reconciliation bill would increase the thresholds to $27,500 and $10,200 for family and individual coverage; it also delays imposition of the tax to 2018
Caps FSA annual contributions at $2,500 (indexed) The health reconciliation bill delays the effective date of the cap by one year.
Neither the bill that was signed into law, nor the health reconciliation bill, would repeal (or restrict) health insurers’ antitrust immunity.
Additional Reconciliation Bill Issues of Concern:

A proposed 3.8% tax (the proceeds of which would go to the Medicare trust fund) on high income ($200,000/individual and $250,000/married) taxpayers’ unearned income.

A new rate review entity at the federal level that would have to approve health insurance premium increases.

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As I watch’d the ploughman ploughing,
Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting,
I saw there too, O life and death, your analogies;
(Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)

Environment

I have been struggling to help my daughter Lily with her 4^th grade homework.  Not entirely because my math skills are tested in the process but because I lack patience.  Lily has a familiar inability to focus on the details of her homework and as a fellow Right Brain thinker, I haven’t been much help.

What I found is that while we prefer a right or left brain approach to processing information, we can overcome this tendency.  As right brainers, Lily and I naturally process the whole question leaving the details for last.  We have to consciously line up the pieces of information in a logical order, where a left brain thinker would do this automatically.

Lily (and I) tend to start with the answer first and work backwards.  This is impossible in situations where we must process new information.  We need to know Why first, then it becomes easier to determine How.  Now that we start each homework exercise with a review of the entire project, Lily is finding it less difficult to find a starting point.

I have lived my life in the big picture – starting with visions and working backwards to determine execution and viability.  It’s not the outline but the outcome that comes to me easily.  But, more and more I appreciate the lefty inside me who can approach conclusions after lining up the facts.  To be sure you are right, engage what you have left.

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To You

by Walt Whitman

(1819-1892)

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why
should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?

Uncategorized

Beneath our planets oceans and lakes, embedded in its rocks and tree roots lay nearly half the living material on our earth.

Scientists are claiming that our “subsurface biosphere,” extending thousands of meters, may hold keys to solving major environmental, agricultural and industrial problems.

I was interested to read about an Ocean Drilling Program that will send its high-tech drill ship, the JOIDES Resolution, to the Juan de Fuca Ridge off the Canadian coast in the Northeast Pacific.   They will pump dyed fluids into selected places so scientists can follow the flow of water and microbes through a maze of subsurface “plumbing.”

One objective will be to determine whether deep sea chemicals, such as hydrogen and sulfur, that don’t depend on energy from the sun on Earth’s surface can nourish subsurface microbes.  Too cool!

Environment