NASE gives thumbs down to health reform bill

Posted on | December 23, 2009 | Comments Off

nase

Yesterday, it became official.

The National Association for the Self-Employed announced yesterday that the organization is opposing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 (H.R. 3590), which the Senate is expected to pass any day now.

According to a statement released yesterday, NASE legislative experts consider the Senate effort to be an improvement over what passed in the House earlier this year. However, it is both chambers’ failure to address the issue of affordability, particularly for nonemployers (the self-employed) that has made it impossible for the NASE to throw its support behind the measure.

I couldn’t possibly improve on this, so I’ll let them say it in their own words:

The self-employed are seventy-eight percent of all small businesses in the United States. For the past ten years self-employed businesses have grown faster than all other segments of the business population, contributing close to $1 trillion dollars to our economy in 2007. Yet, one-third of self-employed individuals are currently uninsured, with cost being the primary reason for their lack of insurance. Furthermore, seventy-one percent of self-employed individuals have gone uninsured at some point in their lives. Those with coverage have experienced double-digit premium increases every year, making it difficult for them to retain insurance.

(To flesh out the numbers for you, those nonemployers numbered 21.7 million as of 2007. Over the decade to which the NASE statement refers, they have increased in number by 6.3 million or 41%. That may not sound like much to you but, over the same period, employer firms have increased by only half a million, or about 9%. In terms of business population growth, the ten years between 1997 and 2007 have been almost all nonemployers.)

Evidently, the folks at the NASE have been trying to work with Senate members and staff but to no avail. For example, the Senate also failed to include provisions from the Tax Equity for the Self-Employed Amendment (S. Amdt. #3013), which would have provided the self-employed with a 50 percent business deduction for their health care costs.

According to the NASE, the Senate has chosen instead to focus its budgetary resources on providing assistance to employers that help workers buy insurance. Meanwhile, nonemployers will have to wait four years for any premium assistance from the government.

Even then, individuals earning more than $43,320 and households earning in excess of $88,200 will not qualify for assistance at all. It is cost that keeps nonemployers from buying health insurance. With neither cost reduction measures nor premium assistance available, it might be safe to call this entire 2,400-plus page bill useless for the self-employed.

“The primary goal of reform should not solely be to increase the ranks of the insured at any cost, but rather to create a stable health insurance market that allows for affordable coverage options to ensure that the chief contributors to our economy – the self-employed – are not at risk of facing higher health expenses,” commented Kristie Arslan, executive director of NASE’s legislative offices. “As it stands, the self-employed will receive no tangible, immediate bottom line savings on health costs from the Senate bill.”

You can read the NASE statement in full here.


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