Paving the Way to Affordable, Accessible Health Care

Paving the Way to Affordable, Accessible Health Care
July 29, 2005

Health care and its rising costs are a concern to many families across the country. Last week, the House passed two significant pieces of health care legislation that will help Americans obtain the best quality health care at the least cost.

Health care costs have been on a steady rise due, in part, to skyrocketing insurance premiums resulting from large malpractice lawsuits. Doctors, hospitals and other health care providers have been forced to severely limit their practices or have been pushed out of medical practice altogether due to the extraordinarily high costs of malpractice insurance. The national medical malpractice insurance rate has risen nearly 500 percent in the last thirty years.

H.R. 5, the Help Efficient, Accessible, Low Cost, Timely Health Care (HEALTH) Act safeguards patients' access to care by limiting the number of years a plaintiff has to file a healthcare liability action to ensure that claims are brought while evidence and witnesses are available. It also allocates damages fairly, in proportion to a party's degree of fault, allows patients to recover economic damages while establishing a cap on non-economic damages, such as pain and suffering, of $250,000, and places reasonable limits on punitive damages.

Small businesses have also taken a blow due to the high costs of health care. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 45 million Americans lack health insurance and over 60 percent of the working uninsured work for or depend on small employers who lack the ability to provide health benefits for their workers. This is simply unacceptable.
H.R. 525, the Small Business Health Fairness Act, increases access to health insurance and ensures that patients have the maximum flexibility in choosing their health care provider.

This Act would allow small businesses to band together through associations and purchase quality health care for workers and their families at a lower cost. These Association Health Plans (AHPs) will increase small businesses' bargaining power with health care providers, give them freedom from costly state-mandated benefit packages, and lower their overhead costs by as much as 30 percent. Many Americans already enjoy the benefits of affordable healthcare through large corporate employers. Small businesses are the backbone of many communities across the country and it is time to level the playing field and provide small business owners and their employees access to affordable health care.

Accessible, affordable health care should be an option for everyone from employees of large corporations to employees of small, family-owned businesses. These two bills will make that option possible for millions of Americans by ensuring that health care providers are able to continue their services by pulling in the reins on medical malpractice lawsuits and giving small businesses the tools they need to provide health care to their employees.

http://www.house.gov/apps/list/speech/va06_goodlatte/072905.html