Health Care Mandate Ruled Unconstitutional by Virginia Judge

A key part of President Barack Obama’s health care reform law has been declared unconstitutional by a Virginia federal judge. This sets the stage for a long legal struggle which will likely end up in the Supreme Court.The “individual mandate,” which requires the purchase of health insurance by all Americans, was struck down by U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson in the case of Virginia v. Sebelius. Hudson wrote, “An individual’s personal decision to purchase — or decline purchase — (of) health insurance from a private provider is beyond the historical reach of the U.S. Constitution. No specifically articulated constitutional authority exists to mandate the purchase of health insurance.” This decision contradicts another court ruling that the mandate is constitutional. The ruling is expected to be challenged in a federal appeals court by the Department of Justice.The administration had previously received a favorable ruling on the mandate by a federal judge in Virginia. The favorable decision was the same as that reached by a Michigan judge in October. Officials in Virginia argued that the government does not have the authority to force Americans to buy a commercial product like health insurance. They base this belief on the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.There are a few states that have specific laws stating that residents cannot be forced to buy health insurance and Virginia is one of them. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a conservative Republican said, “I am gratified we prevailed. This won’t be the final round, as this will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, but today is a critical milestone in the protection of the Constitution.”President Obama and Attorney General, Eric Holder, have been urged to request an expedited appeal to the Supreme Court by incoming House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor (R-VA). Cantor has stated, “Ultimately, we must ensure that no American will be forced by the federal government to purchase health insurance they may not need, want, or be able to afford. In this challenging environment, we must not burden our states, employers, and families with the costs and uncertainty created by this unconstitutional law, and we must take all steps to resolve this issue immediately.”The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in March, is considered the signature legislation of his first two years in office. For months after taking office President Obama had promoted the Democratic led reform.In 2009, there were 45 million Americans without health insurance, which is about 15 percent of the U.S. population. The health care reform was designed to help the millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans. The plan is that the government will impose health insurance mandates and subsidies to ensure that all Americans receive affordable health care.Critics of the new law have called it socialized medicine and fear that it will lead to higher taxes and substandard health care services. There have been dozens of challenges to the reform filed in federal courts all over the nation.The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the law by a California conservative group in November. The court justices will not get involved in this early stage of the legal process. Rarely does the Supreme Court accept cases that have not been thoroughly reviewed by lower courts. It is expected that the larger issues in the debate will end up before the Supreme Court but legal experts do not anticipate that to happen for at least one or two years.Health care reform has been a top priorities for the Democratic party since the Truman Administration. The reform was passed almost solely by Democrats in party-line votes and opponents of the reform call it “Obamacare.” Since the midterm elections, Republicans now hold the majority in the House and vow to overturn or severely limit the reform law.Judge Henry Hudson wrote, “While this court’s decision may set the initial judicial course of this case, it will certainly not be the final word.”

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Home Health Care Costs – Charges You Should Know

People facing the need of home health care for their disabled or elderly family, are often also faced with difficult financial struggles. While a lot cheaper than a hospital stay, home health can get expensive. Here are some of the things to think about when considering health care from home.The number one cause for home health care needs is the elderly. More and more elderly are wishing to live independently as long as possible. With this comes the need for home health. These visits can range from monthly to daily. Sometimes it becomes necessary for around the clock care. In these cases, the costs for health care from home can really start to rise. It’s imperative to understand these changes and charges up front so you’re not surprised when things start happening. Most of the associations which provide such services charge per hour rates. This is a great way to keep track of how much you’re spending on the care.Obviously the more experienced and established agencies are going to charge more for their care providers. This is when you do your homework. You have to understand how much you actually have available to spend on the care. Then look for a company that can provide what you need at a cost you can afford. Many require contracts up front so you should be familiar with the limitations and needs of the patient. Your loved one’s doctor is a great place to start when figuring who to use and for how long.Home health care supplies can get costly as well. Many patients need constant upkeep of tubing and medications. Wheelchairs and adjustable beds are often necessary. Opting for health care from home sometimes means turning your spare bedroom into a mini hospital room. There are medical supply companies that deliver these items directly to your home. The nurses can also recommend good local companies for these needs. They’re used to dealing with them and know who you can trust.Getting help paying for the costs of home health care may not be as difficult as you think. With the elderly, there is usually Medicare or Medicaid. Some elderly have retirement funds and other forms of income. Social Security and Disability pay are available for elderly and disabled. Sometimes in the event of injury there is an insurance settlement that will cover home health expenses. For terminal patients of any age, Hospice is a great non profit organization that covers all expenses. If none of these are an option for you, check into local branches of the National Association for Home Health. They will be able to lead you in the right direction and get you started with help.

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Commercial Mortgage Training – Current

Commercial mortgage training is a broad topic with many areas that need to be mastered in order for the commercial loan officer to be truly competent and successful. Among the more immediate needs is being able to screen deals. We see it all the time as hard working loan officers work on and submit loans that have no chance of closing as there is simply not enough income for the deals to cash flow and thus fund. These loan officers are burning their cash and wasting their time.The idea here is being able to really figure out what the total net income is and then calculate the debt coverage ratio. A lot has been written on how to calculate the Debt Coverage Ratio (DCR or DSCR). The basics of this ratio though is calculated by dividing the annual proposed mortgage payments by the net income that the property (in the case of an investment property) or the net income that the business produces (in the case of an owner occupied transactions). Net income meaning the income remaining after all expenses have been paid (like taxes, insurance, payroll, etc).For example say the proposed loan amount is $1,000,000 and the monthly P & I payments are $10,000 per month or $120,000 per year. And say that the property is owner occupied and the business nets $15,000 per month or $180,000 annually. By dividing the debt payments of $120,000 by the net income of $180,000 the proposed loan boasts a 1.5 debt coverage ratio, which by the way is strong. Most banks want to see a minimum of 1.2 to 1.3 for special purpose properties.The challenge here is trying to figure out what exactly the net income is. This can be difficult to calculate especially on owner occupied transactions. You have to be able to extract the income out of the borrower’s tax returns. And many borrowers will have 3 sets of tax returns to go through – personal, business and real estate entity which often is over 300 hundred pages. So in order for the commercial mortgage broker to figure out if the loan cash flows they will have to know how to read tax returns or they won’t really know if they are working on a viable deal or not. And they will waste many hours working on a loan that has no chance of closing.The commercial loan officer does not need to get a degree in accounting but as implied above has to have a basic understand of what can and what cannot be used as income for a proposed commercial mortgage.

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Hotel Loan Modifications

Commercial loans are created individually for each industry. One form of commercial loan is the hotel loan provided to the hotel and motel industry. These loans are given to people who wish to either start a hotel or make improvements to the present state of their existing hotel business. In the past, there were many financial institutions that provided commercial loans for the hotel and motel industry. Today many of these financial institutions are in trouble and want to see an exemplary business plan that ensures any loan given can be paid back by the borrower within a specified period of time.If a borrower defaults on their commercial loan, a commercial loan modification is advised. With declining tourist traffic, many hotel and motel owners are unable to keep up with current loan payments. In this case, lenders will usually decide to accept a hotel loan modification to eliminate non-performing loans from their books. A hotel loan modification will typically rework loan payment schedules, lower interest rates and lower the monthly payments for the borrower. A hotel loan modification agreement will be drawn up with the new terms and conditions stipulated and signed by both parties.Hotel lenders are familiar with the hotel and motel business and employ experts to scrutinize the business plan of the borrower. These experts look for certain business essentials, such as the availability of customers and the cost of real estate where a hotel is located. Hotel loan modifications are drafted like any other commercial loan, but specific areas that apply to the hotel and motel industry will be outlined. A long term plan is drawn up for the repayment of the loan which the borrower agrees to meet. Available loans may have a fixed or variable rate, in which the borrower pays set amounts at varying intervals, or a bulk sum or balloon payment which includes the total loan and interest payments respectively.Smart hotel owners should take advantage of the unusual climate in the commercial loan industry and pursue a hotel loan modification.

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Four Reasons Why Small Business Fail To Plan and Why They Need To Think Again

It is so widely acknowledged that a robust business plan is one of the key ingredients in small business success, it seems remarkable that anyone serious about their business could considerable it optional. For example, Business Link say, “It is essential to have a realistic, working business plan when you’re starting up a business”. A recent survey showed that small businesses were twice as likely to be successful with a written business plan as compared with those without one. The Times in their annual round up of 100 up and coming UK businesses suggest that “poor business planning” is a key reason for failure. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to find an authority that would advocate the opposite idea, a clear signal that this idea is accepted wisdom. Despite this, a recent survey shows that two thirds of small business owners run their businesses on gut instinct alone.I had a very interesting discussion about this a couple of days ago with a good friend of mine who has run several successful small businesses in which he posited the idea of a “planning gene”. He felt that the only possible explanation for the lack of proper planning in small business was genetic.According to his theory, the majority of people are born without the “planning gene” and this explains why so many people don’t have any written business plan, despite the overwhelming evidence of a high correlation between a robust and vigorously implemented business plan and business success. The majority of us are simply not biologically and genetically wired to plan.This is certainly one explanation, although I have to say I have a few reservations as to the validity of his theory. I talk with small business owners about planning every day. I’m part of a small business myself. I’ve owned several small businesses over the last ten years each with varying degrees of success. In all those conversations and all that experience, this was the first (semi) serious discussion I’d had about the planning gene.If I was to aggregate the results of the conversations I have had with actual and prospective customers on this topic, four distinctive strands emerge explaining why small business owners fail to plan. Whilst I have heard a few other explanations for the lack of effective small business planning, I am treating these as outliers and focusing on the most significant.I’m Too Busy To Plan – More often than not, the small business owners we talk to tell us that proper planning is a luxury that only big business can afford. For them, business planning, if done at all, was a one-time event that produced a document for a bank manager or investor which is now gathering dust in the furthest recesses of some rarely opened filing cabinet. There just aren’t enough hours in the day and if forced to choose, they would do the real, physical work and leave the mental work undone, which seems to be the poor relation at best, if it is even dignified with the status of work at all.Traditional Planning Doesn’t Work – The “I’m too busy to plan” excuse is often supplemented with this one. I’ve heard the stories of the most legendary construction overrun of all time, The Sydney Opera House, originally estimated to be completed in 1963 for $7 million, and finally completed in 1973 for $102 million, more times than I can remember. Sometimes, this idea is backed up with some actual research, such as the fascinating study by several eminent psychologists of what has been called the “planning fallacy”. It seems that some small business owners genuinely believe that mental work and planning is a bit of a con with no traction on physical reality.My Business Is Doing Fine Without Detailed Planning – A minority of small business owners we speak to are in the privileged position of being able to say they’ve done pretty well without a plan. Why should they invest time and resources into something they don’t appear to have missed?Planning Is Futile In A Chaotic World – Every once in a while, we hear how deluded we are to believe that the world can be shaped by our hopes and actions. This philosophical objection to planning is perhaps my favourite. It takes ammunition from a serious debate about the fundamental nature of the universe and uses it to defend what almost always is either uncertainty about how to plan effectively or simple pessimism. This is different from the idea that planning doesn’t work as these business owners have never even tried to form a coherent plan, but have just decided to do the best they can and hope that they get lucky as they are knocked hither and thither like a steel ball in the pinball machine of life.As with all of the most dangerous excuses, there is a kernel of truth in each of these ideas and I sympathise with those who have allowed themselves to be seduced into either abandoning or failing to adopt the habit of business planning. Most small business owners feel the same dread in relation to business planning as they do to visits to the dentist, so it’s unsurprising that so many simply don’t bother. However, by turning their backs completely on planning, they are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Taking each idea outlined above in turn, I’ll attempt to show why business planning is critical, not just despite that reason but precisely because of that reason.I’m Too Busy Not To Plan – Time is the scarcest resource we have and it is natural that we would want to spend it doing those things that we believe will have the greatest impact. Of course, we want to spend most of our time producing, but we should also invest at least some time into developing our productive capacity. As Stephen Covey pointed out in his seminal work, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, we should never be too busy sawing to sharpen a blunted saw. Planning is one of the highest leverage activities we can engage in, as when done effectively it enhances the productive capacity of small businesses, enabling them to do more with less. Nothing could be a bigger waste of precious time than to find out too late that we have been using blunt tools in pursuit of our business goals.If we as small business owners weren’t so busy and time wasn’t so scarce, then we wouldn’t have to make choices about what we did with our time and resources. We could simply pursue every opportunity which presented itself. However, for the busy entrepreneur, the decision to do one thing always has the opportunity cost of not being able to do something else. How can we be certain that our business is going where we want it to go without pausing regularly, scanning the horizon and making sure not only that we are on track but also making sure that we still want to get to where we are heading? I believe more time is wasted in the single-minded pursuit of opportunities that are not right than is wasted by over thinking the opportunity of a lifetime.In short, small business owners are extremely busy and their time is precious. So much so that to waste it doing the wrong things with the wrong tools would be tragic. Small business owners that cannot afford the luxury of making expensive mistakes simply must regularly sharpen the saw through continuous business planning.Traditional Planning Doesn’t Work, So We Need a New Approach That Does – There are some fairly large question marks over the effectiveness of traditional business planning techniques. In an age where business models are becoming obsolete in months rather than years, a business plan projecting five years into the future cannot be viewed as gospel. Nobody has a crystal ball and if they did, they probably wouldn’t be writing business plans but using their remarkable predictive powers to some more profitable end.Dwight D Eisenhower said “plans are useless, but planning is essential”. Whilst producing a document called a business plan is far from useless, the real value lies in the process by which the plan is created in the first place. If this process can be kept alive in a business then the dangers associated with traditional planning can be minimised or avoided all together. In an environment of continuous business planning, small businesses can be flexible and adaptive to the inevitable changes and challenges they will face. Rather than quickly becoming obsolete, their plan will simply evolve with the changing circumstances.Accepting that the plan is a living thing that will evolve necessitates a change of approach to business planning. An effective business plan is the response to the repeated asking of the questions what, why, how, who and how much. It is not a 20 – 30 page form to fill in for the benefit of a bank manager or some venture capitalist, who will probably never fully read it. A business plan should help you, not hinder you, in doing business. If traditional business planning doesn’t work for you, it’s time to embrace the new paradigm of continuous business planning.My Business Could Do Even Better With Effective Planning – If you are one of the lucky few whose business has thrived despite an absence of traditional business planning, then I say a sincere well done. I hope that you can say the same thing in five years time.Business life expectancy in Britain and across Europe and indeed the world are in rapid decline. A study done at the end of the eighties and then again as we marched into the new Millennium showed that life expectancy had more than halved for British businesses in those ten years, from an average of 9.7 years to 4.1 years. Just because a company once enjoyed market leadership does not mean that its future is assured. Many high street institutions have fallen victim to the recent recession. Five years ago it was inconceivable that UK retail institutions like Clinton Cards, Game, Borders, Barratts, T J Hughes, Habitat, Focus DIY, Oddbins, Ethel Austin, Principles, Allied Carpets, Woolworths, MFI and Zavvi/Virgin Megastore would all be either out of business or teetering on the brink of oblivion in 2012. Yet that is exactly what has transpired.Any business from the smallest to the greatest is not impervious to the winds of change. A new competitor, a technological breakthrough, new laws or simply changes in fashion and consumer preference can all re-write the future of a company regardless of how bright that future once seemed. It is precisely because these risks exist that business planning is critical. To survive in business is extremely hard, but failing to effectively plan for the future or adapt to current realities surely makes it impossible and failure inevitable.Of course, it is not necessarily the absence of plans that did for these companies but the quality of their plans and most especially the quality of their implementation. Even a poor plan vigorously executed is preferable to the finest planning and research left to rot in a drawer. Continuous business planning is effective business planning because it emphasizes implementation and regular reviews of real results as part of what should be a continual process of improving company performance rather than simply attempting to predict the future and wringing our hands when our prophecy fails to come true. We believe, like Peter Drucker, that the best way to predict the future is to create it.Planning Is Essential In A Chaotic World – We sometimes feel small and insignificant as we try against all odds to translate our dreams into business reality. It’s easy to feel all at sea when we consider some of the challenges we face. However, whilst it is true that we cannot control the direction of the wind, we can adjust our sails and change the direction of the rudder. Difficult and challenging circumstances may come in our lives, but we can control the outcome of these circumstances by choosing which path to take.The truth is that we are fundamentally achievement orientated as human beings. When this is taken away, we lose much of the energy and motivation that propels us forward. There have been numerous studies carried out on life expectancy rates after retirement, which show that when clearly defined goals and daily action moving in the direction of those goals are removed from our lives, the result is literally fatal. The individuals studied who failed to replace their career goals with a new focus for their retirement simply shriveled up and died. The implications for small business owners are clear. Those business owners with clear goals who take action daily that propels them in the direction of their goals are far more likely to thrive and survive than those who take any old goal that comes along or move from day to day with no defined objective other than survival.It seems to me that precisely because life is so chaotic and challenging that effective planning is essential. Without continuous business planning, our businesses and the small business owners that work in them may find that bit by bit they are atrophying and on their way to becoming another business failure statistic.There undoubtedly exists an antipathy for business planning felt by many small business owners. Clearly, this cannot be fully explained by the lack of a “planning gene”, but it equally cannot be fully justified by the reasons most commonly put forward by small business owners to not engage in the business planning process. These reasons must be critically re-evaluated and a commitment made to a continual and never ending process of improving the condition of their small businesses. Without such a commitment, the future for small businesses in the UK is uncertain.

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