More on Healthcare Reform
NFIB’s Senior Healthcare Advisor Robert Graboyes, Ph.D., was recently a guest on the Build Your Business podcast to discuss healthcare and the challenge for small businesses to obtain affordable coverage for their employees.
Listen to the podcast to learn what’s happening in Congress and how NFIB is fighting for small business healthcare reform. (Select the June 9 program, and then the No. 3 and 4 segments.)
The panel discussion focused on the No. 1 issue for small business owners in America—healthcare.
Panelists included Sens. Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Rep. Charles Boustany (La.) and The Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler.
Here’s how they answered.
Butler: “(We need) to move away from a system where employers are organizing the healthcare for their employees and move toward a system that allows healthcare connectors or exchanges do that for them.”
Boustany: “There’s no magic bullet. I approach the problem by looking at what principles should guide us: information, choice and control. Information means implementing IT. It’s also about transparency—creating a fluid flow of information from provider to provider. Choice means creating a wide range of options for business owners large and small, families and individuals to shop and find the plan that best meets their needs. Finally, control means putting the family back in control of their healthcare destiny.”
Lincoln (who sponsors the NFIB-supported SHOP bill): “We have to shift ourselves from a system of healthcare that was designed for acute care to one that is focused on chronic care and promoting wellness.The SHOP plan is geared toward small business. It ensures that the mandates the states already have stay in place, but it allows small businesses to enter pools and use an exchange on the state or national level so they can locate a plan that’s best for them at a lower cost.”
Wyden (who sponsors the NFIB-supported Healthy Americans Act): Four things, he says, are necessary for meaningful healthcare reform for small businesses: cost containment, insurance reform, chronic disease prevention and malpractice reform. “I don’t believe you have to raise taxes to fix healthcare. Here’s the math: This year in the U.S. we’ll spend $2.3 trillion on healthcare. There are 300 million of us. We’re spending enough money on healthcare; we’re not spending it in the right places.”
Texas Member Takes Tax Concerns to the Hill
I am a small business owner, and to have someone say that connectors, and exchanges are the way to solve the "so called" healthcare problem, astounds me. Have they not studied the Mass. situation and how it is floundering dramatically, is both medical care available, and lower cost.
Let's get real folks and get americans back to encouraging empowermen, accountability, and as a result you get ENGAGEMENT in their own health care. Wellness is the point to encourage with incentives.