OPINION:
Talk to small-business owners about healthcare coverage for their employees, and a theme will emerge, regardless of location or industry: They want to provide healthcare benefits for their workers.
They believe in taking care of their people. They know that healthcare coverage provides critical care for employees and their families.
Yet these same business owners will likely also tell you that they cannot, or soon will not be able to, afford to provide that coverage.
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Nationwide, insurance premiums for small businesses skyrocket year after year, often by double digits, outpacing company growth. Rising healthcare costs are forcing small-business owners to make difficult choices: between offering healthcare benefits and hiring new workers, or between raising wages and expanding their enterprises.
If that does not get Congress’ attention, perhaps this will. America’s small businesses employ more than 60 million Americans. That is 46% of our nation’s private-sector workforce. Unlike large corporations, small businesses lack the size and leverage to negotiate better rates or absorb the costs of expensive policy renewals.
In the past 20 years, the share of small businesses offering healthcare coverage has cratered, falling from more than 50% to 32%.
Unless Congress acts, America’s small businesses will keep having to choose between reducing healthcare benefits, delaying hiring, shifting costs to employees or ceasing to offer healthcare coverage altogether.
Each is an impossible choice that will significantly affect our economy and people’s access to care.
Healthcare policy discussions in Washington are always complicated and too often partisan. This one should not be. Small businesses deserve the same opportunity to provide competitive healthcare benefits as large corporations. Congress should help level the playing field by giving small businesses access to more affordable and flexible healthcare coverage options.
This begins by giving small businesses more coverage choices. Congress can do this by creating an environment in which small employers have access to a wider range of coverage solutions and benefit designs.
Small businesses feel cornered into signing off on expensive policy renewals without a clear understanding of why their costs have gone up. Just like families making healthcare decisions, small businesses have very little information about the true costs of care at the doctor’s office, in the hospital or at the pharmacy.
Congress must require better transparency of medical, hospital and pharmaceutical prices for small businesses and their employees.
Small-business owners know how important it is to save for a rainy day and want to help their employees build a cushion against healthcare costs before those costs hit. Congress can expand access and increase the contribution limits for health savings accounts, enabling employees to use pretax savings to pay for the healthcare expenses that matter most to them and their families.
This expansion will give employees more control over their healthcare dollars and more flexibility to choose the healthcare coverage that best fits their needs.
None of this requires Congress to reinvent our nation’s healthcare system. It requires Congress only to treat small-business healthcare benefit costs as the urgent, nationwide problem they are.
Small businesses should not have to choose between providing healthcare benefits for their employees and expanding their businesses. They deserve an insurance marketplace that puts them on a level playing field with large companies. They want reforms that provide more choices for them and their employees. They want cost transparency.
These are reasonable asks. It is time for Congress to listen and deliver.
• Brad Close is president and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Business.
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