New Online Native American Business Primer to Help with Job Creation in Indian Country

The U.S. Small Business Administration yesterday launched a new online tool that helps Native American entrepreneurs prepare for business ownership. The Native American Small Business Primer: Strategies for Success is a free online business course developed for Native American entrepreneurs that gives an overview of basic business principles and of the SBA’s programs and services that help business owners get started.

The new primer is an important tool for American Indians, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian business owners that can lend in our nation’s overall economic health through business ownership and creating new jobs. Our ultimate goal is to help spur job creation and to stimulate economic and business development in our Native American communities.

Continue »

Automakers have best U.S. sales year since 2008

Auto information company Edmunds.com projected that the industry will have sold 12.8 million new vehicles in 2011, about a 10% increase over last year’s volume. That would be the best since automakers sold 13.2 million vehicles in 2008. But the industry has shrunk considerably. From 1999 through 2007, automakers sold 16 million to 17 million vehicles annually in the U.S.

December sales looked to have hit about 1.3 million, or an annualized sales pace of about 14 million, one of the strongest monthly selling rates in years. Edmunds estimated that 2012 new car sales will reach 13.6 million.
 

Continue »

ObamaCare Is Winning the Fight on Fraud and Abuse

Figure 1: Criminal Health Care Fraud Prosecutions over the last 20 years
  Thanks to provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA/ObamaCare) and to an unprecedented effort by the Obama Administration, more progress has been made in the past three years to combat health care fraud and abuse than ever before.

There was a 68.9 percent increase in criminal health care fraud prosecutions from 2010 to 2011, and 2010 was already the highest ever. See the chart below, released last month by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. (Note: NPR did a fine piece on this topic last Friday.)

Continue »