Small Business Health Fairness Act of 2005
SMALL BUSINESS HEALTH FAIRNESS ACT OF 2005 -- (House of Representatives - July 26, 2005)
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Mrs. JONES of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, first of all, I want to thank my colleagues, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind) and the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews), for offering this substitute.
I live in the city of Cleveland. We have a great organization representing many of our smaller enterprises called COSE, and COSE has come together in an attempt to provide health care coverage to small businesses.
I wanted to vote for a piece of legislation that will allow small business to have insurance policies for their people, but I did not want to vote for a plan that did not provide the same kind of coverage that everybody else has, meaning that it did not have to be responsible for State insurance regulations as did other policies.
So by presenting this amendment, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind) and the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews) have offered me an opportunity to say to the small businesses in my community, I support you, and I want to make sure you can provide health care coverage to your employees.
What is also of particular concern to me is that offering something that does not provide the same safeguards is like offering nothing. All we have to do is go back and look at the MEWAs, the Multiple Employer Welfare Arrangement, I guess that is what they call them, the Multiple Employer Welfare Arrangements, which have been used by employers as vehicles to provide benefits. The public record is filled with instances where they have failed, left employees and employers alike with unpaid medical bills.
Mr. Speaker, the other thing that we have to look at is, and the prior speaker said something about subsidies, and you give them to people, and they do not get anything in return. We gave subsidies to the drug companies in the Medicare prescription drug bill, and they got money that they did not even have to use towards a prescription benefit. So do not talk to me about subsidizing anything.
Let us make sure that the people of America and the small businesses have an opportunity to have health care. If we do preventive health care, we would not have so many people coming into hospitals with acute problems because they have not had any prevention.
It is so wonderful that we have a substitute that offers coverage to small employers. Vote for the substitute and vote against H.R. 525, the Small Business Fairness Act.
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