There is much uncertainty about how the recently passed health care reform bill(s) will affect small businesses. And it is an uncertainty that isn't going away anytime soon as the thousands and thousands of pages of regulations implementing the bill(s) have yet to be written. But James Gelfand has been making the rounds seeking to educate business about what's on tap. First up the Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal: What's your overall stance on the health bill as it pertains to small business?

Mr. Gelfand: There are some pieces of the health bill which will be helpful for small businesses, however these benefits will be far outweighed by the negatives. The bill fails to bend the cost curve. It's expanded coverage at the expense of the nation's pocketbook and down the road we will all have to pay.

The Wall Street Journal: What will the bill mean for the smallest of small businesses?

Mr. Gelfand: Only businesses with fewer than 25 employees that have an average annual salary between $25,000 and $50,000 will receive a tax credit starting this year. So we've already ruled out most of the country's small businesses because they are not eligible. And for those that are eligible, many won't want to use this credit. Two years after the exchange is enacted in 2014, the credits disappear. There's no transition, they just go off a cliff and so suddenly a business is having to pay twice as much as they paid the year before in health insurance.

More here, but now over to NPR, with Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan:

CONAN: And to put not too fine a point on it, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was in opposition to this plan all along.

Mr. GELFAND: That's right. We have a couple reasons for that. We think that it's going to be problematic for small businesses. We think most small businesses are completely disqualified from the credits. We think that large businesses are going to have higher taxes, and they're going to have more increased cost, that this plan is not going to put a cap on premiums, and at the end of the day, we're going to end up spending a trillion dollars and maybe not accomplishing what we set out to accomplish.
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CONAN: The increases, James Gelfand, that some people are talking about, these are the price of health insurance, and of course, the health insurance companies say this is not our obscene profits, this is the cost of health care going up all over the place. This is a lot of people's contribution to this. But nevertheless, does this plan, to your mind, restrain the growth in those costs, which have been explosive?

Mr. GELFAND: Unfortunately not. As we've seen over the past 10 years, the cost of the average premium go up about 130 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And the only want to really get those under control is to: A, change the way we pay doctors and hospitals, which means focusing on prevention, focusing on care coordination and focusing on quality over quality, as well as to get people into the game and make them understand how much health care actually costs in order to get a cap on utilization, as well. We don't see those changes, for a large part, existing in this bill...

You can listen to (or read) the full NPR piece here.