BY SANDRA GUY

Amy S. Hilliard, founder, president and CEO of Chicago-based ComfortCake Co., wants more small-business owners like her to understand the benefits of national health-care reform.

"If I can't offer health-care coverage to my employees, I won't get the best employees," said Hillard, whose company sells sweet baked goods, specializing in pound cakes, to food-service companies, online retailers and local grocers Jewel-Osco and Dominick's.

Yet Hilliard has grappled with 15- to 20-percent yearly increases in health-care costs for her employees throughout the nine years she has operated her business.

Now that Hilliard is planning a major expansion, she wants to know every detail of how health-care reform can keep her business profitable, and how she can tell others about the legislation's good points. That's why she attended a Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce meeting Tuesday at the Aon building, where U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., explained the Senate version of the bill.

Durbin conceded that if the Republican candidate won Tuesday's race to fill the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy's seat, the Democrats in the Senate will be hard-pressed to pass health-care reform. Late Tuesday, Republican Scott Brown was declared the race winner. Without the 60 votes required in the Senate, Democrats in the U.S. House would have to agree to pass the Senate's version of the bill as it is now written or they'd have to convince a Republican to vote for a compromise health care plan.

Here are some of the ways the Senate version of health care reform would affect small businesses:

** Individuals and small businesses could choose from among a variety of private health-care plans and policies in state- or multi-state-run exchanges, starting in 2014. Until that time, the proposal would grant $5 billion to states to set up or expand high-risk pools for individual coverage.

** No public health-insurance option exists.

** Small employers with fewer than 25 employees whose average annual wages are less than $50,000 would receive a tax credit. The credits will be phased in. If the business owner pays at least half of the workers' health-care premiums, the owner would receive a tax credit up to 50 percent of the amount when the legislation is fully phased in. A business could not receive the tax credit for paying half of the premium expenses for more than two years.

** Health-insurance companies would be required to spend at least 85 percent of the premiums they collect on actual health-care services.

** The legislation aims to cover 31 million people, or 94 percent of the U.S. population, by 2019, including covering 18 million through Medicaid expansion.