Survey: Will Small Business Owners Support Health Care Reform this Time?

by Mike Hall, Jan 27, 2009

As part of our series looking at health care reform proposals and initiatives from a range of groups and experts, today we take a look at the small business community.

In the early 1990s, when President Clinton launched his ambitious campaign for comprehensive health care reform, it was the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) that struck the sharpest knife into the reform initiative.

But a group of small business owners and employers and self-employed entrepreneurs has found startling similarities between what small business owners see as key issues in health care reform and some of the central principles unions say any plan must be built around.

Main Street Alliance, a network of state-based small business health care coalitions, recently surveyed 1,200 small business owners. The coalition also conducted in-depth interviews and found that small business owners and employers:

• Are concerned deeply about the adequacy of insurance, including the breadth and affordability of services covered by their plans.
• Believe government should provide a public alternative to private coverage.
• Want increased oversight of private insurers.
• Are willing to contribute their fair share toward a system that makes health care work for small businesses, their employees and the communities they serve.

One of the key issues for unions today is defending the public insurance plan that President Obama is proposing as an alternative to private insurance and that insurance companies and right-wingers have teamed up to try kill.

The Main Street Alliance asked small business owners to choose between a reform plan with a public insurance option and one with expanded private market options. Fifty-nine percent preferred the public plan option, while just 26 percent picked the private insurance option.

Here’s what Jim Houser, who runs an auto repair business in Portland, Ore., has to say about insurance companies:

Most health insurance companies have so much power. They decide who is covered and who isn’t, they determine what qualifies as a pre-existing condition and what doesn’t, and they can deny coverage for a procedure and you often have to go through a long appeals process. Health insurance companies are making huge profits off of people’s ill health: that means money that could be taking care of people is going into the pockets of CEOs and investors.

The Obama administration is developing a comprehensive plan to address a broad range of health care concerns. The AFL-CIO has not endorsed a specific plan but has established certain principles that any plan should be built around.

Reform must secure high-quality health care for all; lower the costs that are now crushing working families and businesses; and share responsibility among employers, government and individuals among other principles. Click here for more information.

Of course, the Main Street Alliance’s report, Taking the Pulse of Main Street: Small Businesses, Health Insurance, and Priorities for Reform, is just one of many studies and surveys that needed to be carefully examined. But it does show that while the NFIB may claim to be “the voice of small business,” small business owners and employers speak with many voices. Small business owners in our communities just might be an ally for health care reform.

Click here to read the full survey. Click here to take a look at proposals by California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) calling for a single payer system and recommendations from Health CEOs for Health Reform.

Click here to read about University of California professor Jacob Hacker’s call for a creation of a public health care insurance plan as an option for workers and families who either have private insurance coverage or no coverage at all.

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