Congress Must Act Now on Small Business Health Plans (Sen. Mike Enzi)

As the nation marks “Cover the Uninsured Week

America’s small businesses and working families are crying out for help under the weight of skyrocketing health insurance costs, yet my Democrat colleagues continue to hold small business health plans hostage to their expensive, impossible, and frightening vision of Medicare-for-all.  It is past time that Democrat leaders stopped playing partisan politics with the health care of Americans and focused on delivering results, not empty promises.  Small business health plans and market pooling offer a real solution, for real people, that we can enact this year.

In just five years the average cost of employer-based family coverage has nearly doubled, from $4,248 five years ago to $8,167 per family today, creating an ever-widening gap between the health haves and haves not.  By allowing small business groups and working families to pool their members, we can reduce the cost of health insurance, expand access to health care, and reduce the number of uninsured Americans.

I am continuing to work with colleagues to find a bipartisan approach to expanding access to affordable, market-based group health insurance, and I will continue banging the drum for relief until something gets done.
The Senate recently approved an amendment I offered to the budget bill (S. Con. Res. 21) that would create a deficit neutral reserve fund to be used in the event that the Senate develops a bill to allow market-based, small business health care pooling plans.  As the wide bipartisan support for the small business health plans amendment showed, we are making progress, and I intend to stick with it.  Market-based pooling must be part of any comprehensive health reform solution.