Health-care issues facing New York's small business community will be a key focus of The Business Council's annual Small Business Day in Albany March 27.

Small Business Day is cosponsored each March by The Business Council, the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), and Chamber Alliance of New York State (CANYS). Its purpose is to give small-business operators a chance to discuss priority issues with key lawmakers and staff.

Each year, some 400 representatives of small businesses and local chambers of commerce participate in the event. The agenda typically includes addresses by key legislative leaders, discussions on legislative issues of importance to the small business community, and opportunities for visiting small business proprietors to meet and lobby lawmakers and their key staff members.

In past years, these meetings have been critical to business' efforts to convince lawmakers to reduce taxes, reform workers' compensation and unemployment insurance, and make other critical improvements to New York's business climate.

Small business priorities in 2001 that will be discussed at Small Business Day include:

Small business health-care parity: The Health Care Reform Act of 2000 (HCRA) created a program called "Healthy New York" to make health insurance more affordable for small businesses that have not been offering health insurance benefits. This program affirms the business community's long-held belief that health-care costs are too expensive for the private sector. This new program is an opportunity for many employers to offer benefits to their workers for the first time. It is critically important that small businesses that have long offered health insurance (often at great sacrifice) be afforded the same opportunity to purchase an affordable policy.

The Business Council is urging lawmakers to adopt small business health-care parity by expanding the Healthy New York program to include businesses that were already offering health insurance. And, in coordination with the state's chambers of commerce and employer associations, The Council is working with the Insurance Department and Legislature to urge insurers to offer affordable health coverage to sole-proprietors or 'groups-of-one.'

The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) reports that the cost of health insurance is the primary reason respondents were uninsured. EBRI found that 77 percent of the uninsured they surveyed reported the reason they do not have health insurance is because their employer's plan costs too much, not that a plan isn't available.

Moratorium on health-care mandates: The Business Council is urging lawmakers to delay imposition of any new health insurance mandate until a cost-benefit analysis can be completed by testing a proposed mandate on the state's workforce.

Health-care mandates drive up the costs of health insurance by requiring insurers to include costly coverage options in all health insurance. The effect of mandates on costs is especially pronounced on small businesses, who lack leverage to negotiate more favorable rates with insurers and whose employees often cannot afford the increasing employees' share of costs.

The Council is supporting legislation already being considered in the state Senate and Assembly that would require the state to test the costs and benefits of health insurance mandates on the state employees' health plans before imposing them on private sector plans.

To arrive at an accurate cost analysis of proposed mandates, this act would provide that any new law mandating health insurance coverage would be effective initially for a three-year period and would apply only to policies issued to state employees. Prior to the expiration of the mandated coverage, a report with recommendations would be issued on the advisability of the mandate. The legislature would establish a mandated coverage benefit and cost Commission to study and report on existing and newly enacted health insurance coverage mandates.

Increasing the sales tax vendor credit: This allows any business that collects sales taxes to claim a 3.5 percent tax credit (up to $600 per year) to offset administrative expenses associated with collecting the tax. To gain the maximum credit of $600, a business must have $428,572 in annual sales.

Administrative changes implemented by the state Department of Taxation and Finance that were helpful to business in many ways also had the unfortunate effect of preventing some businesses from ever qualifying for the even 25 percent of the maximum vendor's credit.

The Business Council is urging lawmakers to increase the vendor credit to 10 percent, raise the maximum quarterly credit to $250, and remove the cap for "annual filers" that limits the ability of these small businesses to quality for the best credit.

Accelerating business tax cuts: The Business Council is also urging lawmakers to accelerate already enacted reductions in New York's corporate tax rate.

Corporate tax rates for small businesses are coming down, but not fast enough. Small businesses recently won a welcome tax reduction, but it does not take effect until July 2003, while the new large corporate tax rate becomes effective in July 2001, a full two years earlier. The Business Council believes that the importance of small business to the state's economy justifies an acceleration of that tax cut to July 2001.

A complete agenda and registration form will be posted at The Council's Web site, www.bcnys.org. On-site registration is also available on March 27. For information, call Ellen Muir at 1-800/358-1202.