05/ 30/ 2007
Cut the link between employment and health insurance
We believe that it's important for our members to hear a variety of viewpoints on important small-business concerns, and we plan to bring you these voices on a regular basis. In this issue, Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, discusses his plan to improve access to health care for all.
Every small-business owner is getting clobbered by skyrocketing health-care costs, if they can even afford any health coverage at all for themselves and their workers.
The cure? Require Americans to buy a basic health-insurance policy for themselves (like we do for auto insurance), contain health costs by putting individuals into large private insurance "pools," reduce health-care paperwork and administrative expenses by eliminating several government bureaucracies and establishing electronic transfers and enrollment, and create incentives for more preventive health care. That's what my proposed legislation, the Healthy Americans Act (S. 334), seeks to do.
The Healthy Americans Act is based on the belief that business owners--especially those with small firms--should no longer bear the primary burden of providing health care to working adults and their families. Employer-based health insurance began 60 years ago when America was wrestling with wage and price controls. It makes no sense today when the typical worker changes jobs seven times by age 35 and small-business owners are up against global competitors who have foreign governments pay their health bills and larger domestic competitors who have access to a health-insurance market that shuts out or overcharges small business.
Under the Healthy Americans Act, you and your employees will have at least the same private health insurance as I receive; the only cost to small business would be a small "shared responsibility" payment that would be approximately $6.50 per week per 40 hours worked (not per worker).
Some may question the fairness of requiring individuals to buy a basic health-insurance policy. But if there is no such requirement and those who can afford private health insurance do not buy it (as often happens today), those people will still get sick and often go to hospital emergency rooms--where their bills get passed on to taxpayers like the small-business owners reading this article. You are already paying for universal coverage; you're just not getting the benefits.
My legislation doesn't provide all the answers to the health-care squeeze facing small business, but it delivers the fundamentals:
- Tough cost containment, as the Lewin Group (the gold standard of health policy analysis) reports that it will save almost $1.5 trillion over the next decade by slowing the growth of health costs.
- Real insurance reform that eliminates insurance company "cherry picking" (also known as insuring only the healthy) so companies must compete on the basis of price, benefits and quality.
- Emphasis on health care, not sick care, critically important with the huge increase in preventable, chronic illness.
- Redirection of current inefficient health-care tax breaks, ensuring that all Americans can afford the basic private health plan.
- Easy access to information about available plans, their cost and quality--no more lost hours in the search for quality medical care.
- Incentives for states to enact responsible, legal reforms that reduce defensive medicine and frivolous litigation.
The Healthy Americans Act is described on my site at www.standtallforamerica.com. I'd be very grateful if NFIB members would go there to read more about the legislation and provide suggestions on how it can be improved upon, as some have already done. Many thanks!
