Health Care
Health care costs create a significant barrier to fulfilling the promise of small business, and adversely affect America's long-term competitiveness.
The current system of health care coverage is a patchwork of state, federal, and private initiatives with costs that are too high for America's entrepreneurs.
SBM supports comprehensive national health care reform to level the playing field across the corporate landscape.
Click here to get more information on Small Business Majority’s Affordable HealthCare Project: Launched in California in 2007; expanding to 10 states in 2008.
Comprehensive national health care reform
- SBM supports a long-term solution to America's health care crisis with the goal of access to affordable care for all Americans.
- State innovators, such as Vermont and Massachusetts, provide a good model for how to use different mechanisms to ensure comprehensive coverage.
Comprehensive health care reform at the state level
- In the absence of comprehensive national health care reform, SBM supports bold innovative state initiatives.
- Click here to get more information on Small Business Majority’s California Affordable HealthCare Project.
Re-authorize and expand the successful State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)
- Enact a combination of 2007 Senate and House legislation.
- Ensure coverage for 37% of SCHIP-eligible children whose parents work in small businesses.
National small business health insurance pools
- Risk dilution and aggregated purchasing power reduce costs to small business owners.
- Enact the Small Employers Health Benefits Program Act
- Promote affordable coverage for all, regardless of health history
- Reduce administrative burdens
- Preserve effective state regulation
Health care tax equality for businesses, regardless of size or corporate structure
- Allow self-employed individuals to deduct health insurance costs when computing self-employment taxes.
- Enact the Equity for Our Nation's Self-Employed Act
- Help small businesses control health care costs through tax credits
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Enact the Small Business Health Insurance Expansion Act
Stand-alone Solutions: Unfair, Insufficient, Unrealiable
- Individual and Business Mandates
- Both individual and business mandates can be successful only when partnered with pooling, cost controls an significant government participation.
- Association Health Plans and related Small Business Health Plans
- Both proposals breed adverse selection/two-tiered system.
- Both proposals preempt effective state regulations and protections.
- Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)
- HSAs are a useful supplement but not a real solution to the problems of cost and access faced by most small business people.
