Congress drops the ball — again
To the Times:
If anyone thought that Congress was capable of planning, drafting, writing and passing a $2 trillion, over 300-page bill in little over a week, without it being a boondoggle, they have not followed the Congress in recent years, or maybe ever. Specifically, the so-called Small Business Aid program is riddled with trouble. Hastily conceived and drafted, the trouble began even before money started to flow out of it to the “small businesses” that applied for aid. The website crashed repeatedly and once reached, businesses found it difficult to navigate and to actually submit their application. Further, the demand for aid so outstripped the money allocated, that many businesses never even got any kind of response and only very, very few were granted one of the forgivable loans before the 350-billion dollars of available funds were exhausted. A new bill with billions more of aid is very likely to be passed soon by the Congress and signed by the President.
But, more money is not the only troubling concern. A review of some of the businesses which have already received aid, some in the millions of dollars, is highly disturbing. There are businesses that have received funds that are actually
quite large and have well over the 500-employee upper threshold prescribed in the initial bill. More pointedly, it is not clear what criteria, if any, were used to determine which of the applicants would receive aid and which would not. The list is replete with seemingly noncritically essential businesses like restaurants and even a chocolate factory.
Yes, the bill was intended to help keep Americans working and employed, but, what about prioritizing real essential services, like physician practices for example? Most of these are truly essential “small businesses”. However, if a practice
goes bankrupt and closes, it can pose a very great hardship on their patients who need to try to find a replacement in a country which is facing an increasingly severe shortage of physicians. This is especially true for pediatricians, unlike adult primary care physicians who are receiving aid directly from Medicare. To mothers across the country, there is no more important healthcare provider than their pediatrician, and without aid a good number of these practices may disappear. These issues must be addressed and fixed in the upcoming new small business aid bill.
Ken Derow, Swarthmore