Hillary’s health plan and you
Hillary Clinton is taking another crack at fixing our nation’s troubled health care system, and there’s one good thing about it: Small business owners are on her radar screen.
She’s talking about giving entrepreneurs tax credits if they perform the herculean task of providing their workers with health coverage.
I call it herculean, because it often takes mythological powers to afford the health care plans out there.
 |
| AP |
Check out Hillary pitching her plan. The heart of her plan is requiring consumers to buy insurance either through work or through a program that will be modeled after Medicare. It also would force insurance companies to cover everyone that seeks insurance, even if they have the dreaded “pre-existing condition.” This is a problem that often hits small business owners hard because they can’t spread the risk among a huge workforce as large corporations can.
Some of you entrepreneurs out there may be cringing right about now, thinking, “Who needs more government mandates?”
Many of you voiced that as a big concern after I wrote
a post on Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko.” JRS from Chicago summed it up best: “I find it ironic that your ‘solution’ to small business problems is a further abrogation of property rights and ending for-profit enterprises in health care.”
“As a business owner,” he added, “I have suffered the increased health care costs associated with insuring my employees. I have also suffered the increased costs associated with giving my employees wage increases. Perhaps you could really help me out by putting all my workers on the government payroll!”
But desperation, especially when it comes to our health, can make even free-market types open to change.
“We are a small corporation of two, aged 61 and 63, and relatively healthy,” wrote Rita Dick from St. Petersburg, Fla. “For health insurance with a $2,000 deductible we must pay $1,124 per month. This is extremely difficult not to mention outrageous. I have had to forgo removal of a small basal cell skin cancer because it would cost me over $3,000 out of pocket, which is almost as bad as when I was charged $17,000 for lying in a hospital bed overnight, and having five minutes of anesthesia so my artificial hip could be put back in socket. All politicians should be stripped of their cushy health care that we pay for until we all get guaranteed coverage.”
Before we strip Sen. Clinton of her coverage, let’s see how she plans to spend more of our money.
There aren’t a lot of details yet, but here’s what I’ve been able to decipher. She wants to give a tax credit for small business owners who provide coverage to their employees but also contribute to the cost of those premiums. The credit could be 50 percent of the premiums the firms pay out for businesses with less than 25 employees. If the company is medium-sized the credit could be less, but her plan didn’t specify by how much.
She’s looking for your input and plans to “work with the small business community and Congress to design the parameters of the credit as well as how the credit might dovetail with the tax credit going to individuals and families to make premiums affordable.”
Affordable? Politicians are pumping up the volume on their health-care rhetoric, and there’s a lot more to come in the months ahead. But only time will tell if they’ll be any help for people like Rita.
