An Issue Brief released yesterday by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation (RWJF) concludes that small firms would largely benefit from the reform efforts that have been put forth in both the Senate bill (HR 3590) and the House bill (HR 3200). While the benefits from these bills to small businesses already are uncertain – and likely even deleterious – the latest version of the senate bill is even less likely to result in actual benefits for small employers. Previous Heritage analysis has shown that small businesses would be affected by …
Senator Reid seems comfortable with clandestine negotiations in order to ensure passage of any type of health reform. This course, aside from being politically dubious and whimsical, is fiscally reckless, and with its passage, will continue to add to the debt that will straddle future generations with a significant amount of fiscal stress. As with the previous health reform bills, the assumptions and parameters the Congressional Budget Office must use will likely score this new bill as deficit neutral. Yet, the price tag for the overall bill will not changed, …
No one knows for sure how Senator Reid’s health care bill (HR 3590) will impact any particular person or group, but this much is fairly certain: it will cause health insurance premiums to increase faster—not slower—than they would have otherwise. Even the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s non-partisan accountants, says that premiums in the “public option” of Sen. Reid’s bill would turn out to be higher than premiums in typical private plans today. Thus, there are ways to “bend the health care cost curve” downward, but this bill does exactly the …
The Reid health bill (H.R. 3590) leaves small businesses, and particularly small business owners, largely out of the picture. Small businesses, and particularly small businesses that currently do not offer health insurance coverage, will not get much break from this bill. Reid’s bill outlines a “small business tax credit”, which only lasts for two years and largely excludes small business owners, small businesses with high-average payrolls, and firms with 25 or more workers. After all exclusions, essentially the only eligible firms are those firms with 10 or fewer workers as …
