July, 2009:

via Obama Presses For Health Care Overhaul, Citing Benefits For Small Businesses .
via Weekly remarks: It’s Saturday, so Obama and the GOP argue healthcare – LATimes.

In Obama’s weekly address to the nation he stresses the urgent need to reduce the costs of health care for small business owners. In his address he quoted a study by the White House Council of Economic Advisers that points to the hardships small business owners currently suffer under the current health care industry status quo.

A new study by the White House Council of Economic Advisers said small businesses pay up to 18 percent more to provide health insurance for their employees. As a result, fewer of them do so and the number has been shrinking further in these hard economic times.

It was released Saturday as part of the administration’s aggressive campaign to build public and congressional support for Obama’s health care efforts.

(snip) The White House study said only 49 percent of businesses with three to nine workers and 78 percent of companies with 10 to 24 workers offered any type of health insurance to their employees in 2008. In contrast, 99 percent of companies with more than 200 workers offered health insurance.

Small companies pay proportionately more than big ones because they lack bargaining power and face higher administrative costs, the study found. It said that effectively levied a “heavy tax” on small businesses and their employees.

The CEA’s report released today outlines the ways that current bills under consideration would reduce the financial burden on small businesses. Here are some of the highlights (some paraphrasing for brevity):

• Small businesses that meet certain criteria would be able to purchase health insurance through an “insurance exchange”  – a one stop shopping center to choose the best coverage at the price they can afford.
• Many small businesses with lower incomes would receive a small business tax credit to alleviate their disproportionately higher costs and encourage coverage.
• Firms with payrolls or employment levels below a certain threshold, which would include the vast majority of small businesses, would be exempt from the pay-or-play provisions required of medium to large firms.
• Low-income individuals and families would receive sliding scale subsidies to help them purchase insurance through the insurance exchanges. Additionally, health insurers would not be allowed to screen potential enrollees for pre-existing conditions.
• Reduction of “job lock” where an employee is fearful of leaving one job for another because of the loss of health care.
• Healthier workers equals less time off for sickness.

President Obama laid out a plan to reduce costs and ensure health coverage for small business owners and employees. Shifting gears now, lets take a second look at the Republican Party’s rebuttal to the President’s weekly address.

Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers

This week the rebuttal was given by Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA5), vice chair of the House Republican Conference. She states that the Democrats are demanding to change a system that works great for her and would take away her right to choose. The transcript of her remarks is taken from the LATimes Blog:

I believe it’s much more important to do the right thing, which means reducing skyrocketing health care costs while protecting patients ability to choose the right treatments.

Unfortunately, the Democrats’ health care plan – crafted largely behind closed doors – isn’t the right thing.  It’s a prescription for disaster – one that will put Washington bureaucrats in charge of your family’s personal medical decisions.

Medical decisions that are some of the most personal decisions you’ll ever make. As a mother, I want to make those decisions for my son with a doctor we choose. Anything else is unacceptable.

I want to ask her if the private insurers are doing such a great job then why are many medical procedures turned down by insurance bureaucrats? Why do doctors have to look up a procedure on a list  of acceptable procedures from the insurance industry before he can prescribe?

The next thing she wants you to think about is that the health care reform under consideration will break the bank. This is a fear tactic. Bush used fear tactics to pass his supplemental bills to fund the Iraq occupation which contributed to the highest national debt in U.S. history. McMorris-Rodgers supported Bush’s wild drunken spending.

Also unacceptable is how much this will cost you and your family.  According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Democrats’ proposal will drive health care costs higher than ever.

That, of course, is unsubstantiated hyperbole.

Finally, McMorris-Rodgers touts a non-existent Republican health care plan. The Republicans have not developed any kind of health care bill  to compare or compete with the Democratic bills under consideration, although the bills under consideration have adopted over a hundred amendments put forth by Republicans  such as health care exchanges. The Republican plan called The Patients’ Choice Act of 2009 that was unveiled back in May did not contain any specifics and it never mentioned one word about how to pay for it. Some key points of the plan was absorbed into the Democratic legislation through bipartisan efforts. Republican efforts to push the earlier plan was nixed in favor of obstructionism. McMorris-Rodgers has misled her constituents about the existence of a Republican plan and has failed to mention the bipartisan efforts by both parties in committees, which is lying by omission. In closing, she drones on and on about “our plan” when there really isn’t one.

The Republicans cannot and will not try to compete on the health care reform issues because of their numbers, consequently they are not actively engaged in debate, only harm. To a man, they, including McMorris-Rodgers, have decided to once again obstruct the Democratic Party’s efforts at reform, no matter how needful.

McMorris-Rodgers and the rest of the obstructionist Republicans would rather see more families loose health care, go bankrupt, and/or even die – than agree with the Democrats. They want to defeat this measure to gain political capital (Obama’s Waterloo), not because it is a bad bill.