Health care reform that will enable small business to afford insurance is essential to economic growth and prosperity in this country. My concern is that even with this reform many small business owners will still not be able to afford health insurance.
For many small businesses .... without the ability to attain even temporary loans while waiting for payment on jobs .... they are struggling to survive let alone purchase health insurance.
Supposedly .... according to proponents of the current health care reform legislation ... under the current proposal, small businesses with payrolls under $250,000 are exempt from the requirement to provide health care insurance. Those small businesses that want to participate will receive two forms of help: a new small business tax credit, and the ability to participate in a pool of small businesses to negotiate for lower rates.
However ..... look at social security, the health care provided to veterans (Walter Reid), and the government's ability to manage Fannie Mae. Do you really think that the government is going to be able to manage socialized health care? Social security was once sold to the american people by saying that participants would only have to pay 1% of their first 1,400 in annual incomes, contributions would be deductible for income tax purposes, retireees would never be taxed on the benefits, and that the money would be put into a trust fund and never used for anything else. Is any of this true today?
Bottom line ... the cost of Health Care reform in it's current form will be substantial. The review by the Congressional Budget Office (a non-partisan auditor/IG type body) ..... even confirms that the Bill on the table will cost more than health care does today .... not good news. Plus, one estimate of job loss is at least 1.6 million jobs.
Dollars AND jobs. Not a cost small businesses want or can accept for a flawed attempt at health care reform. We deserve and should demand much better. Let's hope we get it.
All in all .... very scary stuff. The stuff rationing and health care shortages are made of.
It is smoke and mirrors to think that the government program will live alongside private programs. The government program is subsidized by money stolen from our children and grandchildren. It need not make a profit. Therefore it competes unfairly in the marketplace and uses it's subsidy status to drive profit making enterprises from the market. At the end of the day it's the only option left standing. Anti-competitive and grossly anti-American.
Is it worse to have the government restricting access to health care than the free market? Infinitely. The free market is self-limiting with respect to who gets care. Essentially, if you can pay for care, you can get care, just like every other product or service sold in the free market. As it should be.
The government has promised that you can get care whether or not you can pay (or are willing to pay). Great. I don't need to pay anymore because the nanny state provides anyway. Did the problem just get better or worse?
Additionally, our health care system is overstressed right now, largely due to government interference in pricing structures in the form of payment caps. Add 47 million new patients who now have no restrictions to the health care services they seek, and you've increased the workload of our GPs and nurses 20%. Where are you going to get 20% more GPs and nurses tomorrow? It takes 5 years or more to train them. You have just given us a 5 year shortage ASSUMING that despite downward cost pressures on health care services, thousands more men and women will choose to enter the field. Of course the opposite is true. We've seen people exiting the field as cost caps limited profits.
The economics just don't add up. You can't contain costs, cap profits, and increase the base of suppliers in the face of 47 million new buyers.
Welcome to the world of government bureaucrat rationed medicine.