Saturday, April 25, 2009

'Small-group insurance market is simply not working for small business'

David Borris, owner of Hel's kitchen catering in Northbrook, testified April 22 at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on his experiences with group insurance: "I will pay approximately the same amount of money to insure half of my full-time staff as I do in rent in 2009. Surely this is deeply broken. There must be a better way.

"The small-group insurance market is simply not working for small business."

Here's Borris's complete testimony:

(Via HCAN-IL)

Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services released The Bottom Line: Health Reform and Small Business. The report's key findings include:
  • Nearly one-third of the uninsured — 13 million people — are employees of firms with less than 100 workers.

  • In the past two years, more than half of small businesses that offered coverage reported switching to plans with higher out-of-pocket costs in response to rising premiums. Another third switched to a plan that covered fewer services, and 12 percent dropped coverage entirely.

  • Among small businesses that offer coverage, 40 percent report spending more than 10 percent of their payroll on health care costs.

2 comments:

  1. Borris is working for HCAN, a group that has dedicated itself to keeping single payer off the table in favor of a public option that will be subject to regulations written by the health insurance industry.

    ReplyDelete
  2. To understand why the system is broken you first have to look at what an Insurable event is: 1) Is Very Unlikely to happen. 2) Will come without warning. 3) Is something that the insured person never wants to happen. Applies to such catastrophic health events as Serious Illness or Disease & Injury (On the Job and Off). It Does Not Apply To “Routine Health Maintenance”. Yet the current way we pay for health care tries to cover both these needs. We are trying to insure something that is impossible to cover. There is a better way but we won't ever see it because the insurance lobby has every member of the senate & congress by the b#&%s I mean wallet. Our way or you won't get reelected. See my Blog

    ReplyDelete

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