HEALTH REFORM: Small Businesses Eager for New Health Care Approach

Small businesses, who see the rising cost of health care as their primary challenge, are ready for change. In fact, a new survey of 400 small businesses (fewer than 50 employees) who currently pay for some portion of their workers' health insurance shows they are open to considering all sorts of different forms of change from left, right, and center.

In fact, 42 percent said “making health care more affordable” should be the issue that Congress and the new president consider first.

More than one-in-three small business owners (36%) said that rising costs are likely to cause them to cut some portion of health insurance benefits for their employees, according to the survey released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and conducted jointly by Public Opinion Strategies and Lake Research Partners.

“Many small business owners have already reduced their health benefits and asked employees to pay a larger share of the premium, and still they struggle with the ever-increasing costs,” said Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which released the report. “They want health care reform that reduces the burden on their business and where all Americans have affordable health insurance.

Here’s a summary of the findings:

• More than three-in-four (78 percent) said they would support a reform package that combines government-sponsored purchasing pools to allow small businesses to purchase insurance at negotiated bulk rates, along with tax credits to make offering insurance more affordable for small businesses.
• Slightly more than half said they could support a plan requiring employers with 10 or more employees who do not provide health coverage to pay four percent of their payroll to help cover the uninsured. (Remember the respondents are the ones that are already contributing to coverage)
• Two-thirds (68 percent) would support a market-based approach to provide employees with tax credits to purchase their own portable, private health insurance, as well as encourage the use of health savings accounts and include tort reform for medical liability lawsuits.
• Just over half (53 percent) said they would support an approach requiring that at least one public plan and one private plan be offered to all employees, and also requiring insurance companies to provide coverage without regard to age or pre-existing conditions. The approach would be paid for by repealing tax cuts for Americans with annual incomes of $250,000 or more.
• 40 percent of small business owners said they think a mandate requiring employers to offer insurance to their employees would hurt their businesses.

The NFIB is one of several organizations, lobbies, and business groups talking about how to build coalitions to fix the health care system more successfully than the last time we tried. Whether these strange bedfellows coalitions can get past the big concepts and really come to a genuine consensus on the details is still unclear, but as the Boston Globe reports the tone for now at least is constructive.

The Small Business Majority, a group which advocates health care reform, noted in a statement today that the employer survey helped blast the myth that small businesses oppose reform. Small businesses are “willing to pay into a system of shared responsibility that works and ensures small business access to affordable quality healthcare,” said the group’s founder John Arensmeyer. “It’s not a question of ‘if’ we should pursue reform, it’s ‘how.’ And more importantly, ‘when.’”