02/ 11/ 2008
by Todd Stottlemyer, NFIB President and CEO
This won't come as any surprise: For more than 20 years, you and other small-business owners have told us that access to affordable health care is your biggest concern and the problem is even greater today.
You've seen nearly 100 percent increases in premiums since 2000. You know that, on average, small business pays 18 percent more than large business for the same health care benefits. It's clear that the bottom line for small-business people is the cost of health insurance and the growing expense of health care. And they go hand-in-hand.
When you consider that small business creates approximately 70 percent of all new jobs in this country, it should be clear that we have a health care crisis on our hands, and not just for small business, their employees and their dependents, but for everyone.
Many of the policy discussions to date have focused on affordability, coverage or quality. To small-business people, this is not a multiple-choice question. The answer is "D, all of the above." We simply can't address the health care crisis unless we address affordability, coverage and quality as part of a total solution.
For that reason, we've developed a set of 10 principles that must form the foundation of any comprehensive health care reform effort. We've built upon what you've told us, plus brought in some of the best and brightest health care policy experts from across the political spectrum to gain their perspective on health care reform.
You can read more about the principles in this issue's "Health Care Corner" on page 27, but here are a few:
- Universal coverage: This does not mean a government-run, single-payer system. It means that everyone should have access to quality care that is affordable and that provides protection against catastrophic costs.
- Affordable: We want to provide access to quality care for all Americans, so we've got to address both the cost of health insurance and the increasing cost of health care.
- Private and competitive: Health care reform needs to take place within a private and, most importantly, competitive marketplace with real choices for consumers.
- Portable: Americans should be able to go from job to job without the risk of losing their health insurance. Otherwise, you have a form of "job lock" where people are reluctant to go out and start a new business for fear of losing their health insurance. That is fundamentally unhealthy for the American economy. We want people to go out and start new enterprises, to have new ideas and take risks, so that our economy can continue to create jobs.
We are meeting with policymakers to discuss these core principles to ensure that they understand your unique needs and the impact any reform will have on you and your employees. We're also using the principles to guide the development of more specific policy initiatives based on additional research that we have asked The Lewin Group, one of the nation's pre-eminent health care consulting organizations, to undertake. They will be talking to many of you—our members—for a project that will help all of us, policymakers included, understand the particular health care reforms favored by small-business people and the impact those reforms might have on the overall health care system.
With the presidential campaigns kicking into high gear and health care at the top of the domestic agenda, the time is right to set the table for reform in 2009. And we're widely recognized as having the power to significantly influence the debate. Recently, in discussing NFIB's health care initiatives, the Los Angeles Times described NFIB as "the leading small-business organization, a lobbying juggernaut."
This power comes from you, our members. And we're proud to represent you to policymakers, giving them a clear roadmap to navigate through the maze of options for reform. Our message? When the health care system is fixed for small business, it's fixed for all Americans.
We'll continue to talk more about what we're doing to address this crisis in future issues of MyBusiness. In between issues, you can keep up with the latest on our efforts to bring you health care reform at www.NFIB.com/healthcare.
