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Occasionally in the coming weeks and months,borse chanel prezzi,polo femme, The Agenda will introduce you to small-business owners who are wrestling with how to provide health insurance to their employees. Over time, we hope to delve into all aspects of a crucial decision not just managing the costs but sorting out benefit packages, weighing alternatives,polo femme, and dealing with insurers and brokers. Along the way, we hope to get a better understanding of how the 2010 health-care legislation will, or won’t,ralph lauren, affect small businesses.

Today we meet Ann Gish,ralph lauren pas cher, who designs high-end bed linens from offices in Manhattan. As we proceed with this series, we’d like to hear from you. What questions would you like us to ask of the business owners we profile? Do you have an interesting health insurance story to tell? Please .

THE OWNER Ann Gish,ralph lauren outlet, 63.

THE COMPANY designs and distributes luxury bed and table linens and pillows, which are sold at Bergdorf Goodman, NeimanMarcus.com and boutiques nationwide. In 2011, the company in Manhattan. Excluding Ms. Gish and her husband,polo ralph lauren pas cher, Ann Gish Inc. employs 10 people in the United States.

WHAT THE COMPANY PAYS The company bears the entire premium cost for its workforce,ralph lauren pas cher,polo ralph lauren pas cher,polo ralph lauren, $472 a month per employee. It?provides individual coverage only, but Ms. Gish said that most of her employees are either unmarried or have spouses who get insurance through their jobs. One sales manager,chanel,ralph lauren GOLF - On Par Blog - NYTimes.com,polo homme polo ralph lauren pas cher Revealed How Twitter, however,polo ralph lauren polo homme Matter’s vision for long-form, has a self-employed husband with a pre-existing condition and a child. Ms. Gish pays the employee’s premiums, and the employee pays the insurance for the rest of her family an additional $1,300 a month. “She used her agent, we used our agent, and this was the best we could do,” Ms. Gish said. “If she could find a better deal, we’d give her the $500.” Ms. Gish said she is giving serious thought to reducing the share of employee premiums that her company pays: “I want to see what happens business-wise over the next year, and I want to see what happens when the health care reform kicks in.”

THE PLAN Ann Gish offers preferred provider organization coverage,polo,borse gucci prezzi Why Is It So Hard to Find Good, a form of managed care that favors doctors and hospitals that are in-network. One aspect of the plan that galls Ms. Gish is that doctors must seek permission from the insurer before prescribing some treatments. However, Ms. Gish said, the plan is “non-gated,” meaning that employees don’t need permission from their primary doctor to see a specialist.

THE INSURER Currently,polo femme,louis vuitton borse, it’s Aetna; before that,gucci, it was Oxford. “We’ve changed either every year or every two years,ralph lauren pas cher,” Ms. Gish said, “because they take away the policy that you have,polo lacoste,polo femme, and they give you a new one that’s more money and generally fewer benefits.” In recent years, premiums have bounced around, Ms. Gish said: $422 in 2009, $479 in 2010,polo Thomson Reuters, back down to $443 last year,House Vote Northern Whites, and now back up again. Meanwhile, she said, this year employees face slightly higher co-payments and much steeper deductibles.

THE HEADACHE Pounding and relentless. Even simple tasks, she said, like adding or removing employees from the rolls,polo homme, are complicated: “My husband, who does all of the C.F.O. stuff, has spent hours and hours and hours on this. And I spend a couple days a year on it. And I’m not stupid. I’ve started a successful business.”

WHAT DIFFERENCE THE OVERHAUL HAS MADE SO FAR None. She looked into the available to small businesses under the law but found that the average wages her company pays exceed the law’s $50,000 threshold for the credit.

WHAT SHE WANTS FROM REFORM Simplification. Health insurance, Ms. Gish said,borse gucci prezzi, “should be put together in a way that any idiot could understand.” Though Ms. Gish has occasionally read press accounts of how the Affordable Care Act will change insurance, she concedes that she still does not know what to expect. “I figure when 2014? comes, I’ll have to learn it,” she said. “But since I feel pretty powerless about doing anything, and since it could all change before then, what’s the point in trying to sink your teeth into it now?”

Do you have any thoughts on Ms. Gish’s situation? What percentage of employee premiums does your company pay?

If you want to be scared, truly terrified, listen to Mark J. Grant. He might be right.

For the last two years, Mr. Grant, a managing director based in Florida at a regional investment bank, has been predicting the bankruptcy of Greece and a cascade of chaos across the global economy, attracting quite a following on Wall Street in the process.

“Greece will be forced to return to the drachma and devalue, and the default will cause bank runs and money flowing into Germany and the United States as the only viable safe haven bets,” he declared the day before Sunday’s Greek elections,borse gucci prezzi,louis vuitton Energy Security, irrespective of which party would win. “Greece will default because there is no other choice regardless of anyone’s politics.”

He then walked through the falling dominoes: “It will hit the (), the banks on the other side of the derivatives contracts, all of the Greek banks who are really in default at present and being carried by Europe as well as the nation, and the Greek default will spread the infection in many places that we cannot imagine because so much is hidden and tucked away in the European financial system.”

Welcome to Doomsday, brought to you by Mr. Grant. He says he doesn’t think of it as such; he calls it “reality.” He told me on Monday, almost hopelessly, “There’s only so much money to go around.”

In a Jan. 13, 2010, report,outlet gucci louis vuitton sito ufficiale How Citigroup CEO, Mr. Grant forecast that Greece would default on its government debts, one of the first to publish such a prognostication.

Mr. Grant could be the Nouriel Roubini (Dr. Doom) of the European crisis. Mr. Roubini, the economist,ralph lauren pas cher Trail Mix - NYTimes.com, said the subprime-debt sky was falling for a long time before it fell. Few people listened, in part,ralph lauren pas cher ralph lauren pas cher Investment MacroScope, because nobody had ever heard of him. Then, of course,polo homme, the sky fell. Now everybody has heard of him. Time will tell, but soon everybody could know Mr. Grant.

The January 2010 report,polo homme, written two years before Greece did indeed default,polo ralph lauren pas cher,polo ralph lauren, has made him the go-to forecaster of Europe’s collapse for some of the world’s largest investors. Nicknamed the Wizard, Mr. Grant,polo homme, who works for Southwest Securities, sends out a daily report, often frightening in its detail and matter-of-factness,polo femme, by e-mail to a who’s who of the world’s biggest institutions,polo ralph lauren pas cher, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds. Subscribers like , a founder of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, pay thousands of dollars a year to receive Mr. Grant’s views in their in-boxes.

Never one to sugarcoat his views, his success is partly a function of his plain-spoken way of making complex ideas simple.

“There is only one way out of this mess and that is if Europe keeps handing Greece money like one does to some aged aunt that cannot support herself, but that is a family decision,borse chanel,” he wrote. But, he argues,ralph lauren pas cher,ralph lauren, “Greece requires 16 other family members to support her jointly and the politics in many of these nations, including Germany, is making it difficult for the charade to continue.”

His view of European officials’ effort to “fire-wall” the problem countries is equally simple: “This whole subject is a ruse in my opinion. Think of horses in a corral. The rancher keeps trying to build a higher and higher fence around his horses but for what purpose? For the rancher it is to keep the wolves out.”

Mr. Grant, who loves to mix metaphors, takes his rancher metaphor further: “The real problem is that the horses are sick, infected and that the disease of fiscal mismanagement has spread to virtually every horse in the corral except one and do not expect that one,polo lacoste pas cher The Get Louis Vuitton, Germany, to remain disease-free much longer.”

Layering on another metaphor, he adds: “You can call cancer a cold if you like but it changes nothing; not one thing.”

Sadly, Mr. Grant is not predicting the default of just Greece,borse gucci, he’s already on to Spain (he reached that conclusion before many others,ralph lauren, too).

“The country cannot afford to pay off their regional debt,polo femme,polo femme, their bank debt,” he wrote on Monday,ralph lauren, “and various schemes to avoid the Men in Black from taking over will not work nor will the pleas for ‘more Europe’ as the words mouthed by Germany are meant for placation only and will not find implementation in any kind of timeline that will make any difference.”

He has convinced himself that Germany,ralph lauren home, the only country in a position to help,ralph lauren, will not come to the rescue. “You can bank on one thing if nothing else; the Germans will not allow their cost of funding to rise or their standard of living to decline to help the nations that have gotten themselves in trouble. You can count on this!” he wrote.

As we were talking on Monday, he said he wanted to make clear that he did not believe Armageddon was upon us. And it’s not as if Mr. Grant is wishing this to happen,polo ralph lauren pas cher, despite his boat in Fort Lauderdale, named “Wishes Granted.”

“I don’t think the world is going to hell,” he said. “It’s very negative. What’s going on is serious. It will have a whole slew of negative consequences.” But he insisted, “I don’t think it’s going to get to the 1930s.”

More likely, he said, we are headed for a bad recession with lots “of shocks to the system.” He says this will likely happen in the next four months unless “there is debt forgiveness or Europe keeps handing them money like they are a ward of the state.”

“Or,polo lacoste pas cher Future Shock Bryan Singer Di,ralph lauren femme,” he warned, “it could come sooner.”