Thu 7 May 2009
Senators Propose Small Business-Centric Health Care Reform
Posted by Megan Dorn under Business and Politics, Small Business
While the Congressional health care reform debate isn’t scheduled to begin until early this summer, some members of Congress are already setting the debate in motion. Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) introduced Tuesday a piece of legislation called the Small Business Health Options Program or SHOP (According to the unspoken laws governing acronyms, I feel it should be SBHOP, but whatever.), which addresses the issue of small businesses and the difficulty they have providing their employees with health insurance.
Right now there are 16.8 million uninsured workers at firms with fewer than 100 employees, which is 63 percent of the total uninsured workforce, according to BusinessWeek. With small business making up such a large chunk of this country’s lack of insurance issues, it behooves Congress to place particular emphasis on alleviating the financial pains that make it difficult for small business owners to provide health insurance in the first place.
The SHOP proposal has three major components, according to the full press release.
- Allowing small businesses and the self-employed to band together across state lines and spread the risk over a large number of participants in order to obtain lower premiums.
- Providing tax credits for small business owners and the self-employed to offset contributions to employee premiums.
- Banning health status rating in order to protect small businesses and the self-employed from large rate increases simply because one employee gets sick.
Whether or not this piece of legislation will have any stickiness is still too early to tell. The fact of the matter is this summer’s debate is going to be met with all kinds of proposals and deeply-held opinions that will span the spectrum, and that’s OK. We can disagree on the means to health care reform, but while the U.S. health care system currently costs more than that of any other industrialized nation and yet leaves more patients dissatisfied, most of us can agree that the status quo is simply not getting the job done.
