Senate Discusses Affordable Health Insurance For Small Businesses and The Self-Employed

Senate Discusses Affordable Health Insurance For Small Businesses and The Self-Employed in Politics and Legislation

The Senate Finance Committee held a hearing last week to discuss ways of making health insurance affordable for small businesses and self-employed people, reported the Washington Times.

“We will help a big chunk of the uninsured, if we can figure out how to provide affordable insurance options to small-business employees,” said Senator Max Baucus, who is also the chairman of the committee.

“A bill that comes out of this committee should provide more insurance options to the self-employed,” Senator Baucus added.

A majority of the uninsured in America are either self-employed or working for a small business. Coverage can be very expensive for self-employed Americans — premiums average over $1,000 a month for their family’s insurance. Small businesses also have trouble finding affordable health insurance for their employees, and premiums often are too much for their bottom lines to handle.

Some proposals would give tax credits to help small business employees and the self-employed pay for coverage. Lawmakers also discussed the idea of creating a large, nationwide pool of self-employed individuals and small business workers.

But some argue that a risk pool won’t do the trick.

“The experience of single-state purchasing pools created in the mid and late 1990s suggests that adding more pooling options to the risk pooling that already exists in small group markets by virtue of state rate regulation may not add much value,” said Joel Ario, who is the commissioner of the Insurance Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Instead, Ario suggested that self-employed people could be included in small group plans designed for small businesses.

But legislation addressing affordable coverage for small businesses and self-employed is still a ways away, wrote the Times.

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