Thank you, Representative Lummis. What I think is of concern to those of us from Colorado, and I think many people across the country, is what is the impact upon jobs and employers. There is a concern about small business in particular.…
Thank you, Representative Lummis.
What I think is of concern to those of us from Colorado, and I think many people across the country, is what is the impact upon jobs and employers. There is a concern about small business in particular.
There is a provision in the Pelosi bill, the Pelosi health care reform bill, that has a surcharge on small businesses and employers. Now, granted, it has moved up to where it was in the first version, H.R. 3200, where it was if somebody had the average annual payroll between $250,000, and then it started as a surcharge at 2 percent up to $400,000 on an average annual payroll, with an 8 percent surcharge, that number has been moved up a little bit; but I think it's still going to be devastating to the economy. With $750,000 and above it's an 8 percent surcharge, and then it's graduated a little bit down below that.
To put a surcharge on employers, a payroll tax, if you will, on employers that are just trying to keep their doors open, to keep making, to be able to make the payroll that they have, I think, is going to be a devastating job killer to this economy. I think we ought to focus on job creation and not job killers.
The majority of small businesses, they are the job creators. They are the engine for job creation in this country, these really small businesses. Whether we like it or not, the reality is that oftentimes start-ups don't have the cash flow to support health insurance. I started a small business in Colorado and for the first 7 years was not in a position to offer health insurance. When I could, it was at a 50/50 split with the employee.
What this legislation says is that's not even good enough, that you have to be able to pay 72.5 percent of a federally approved plan through the insurance exchange or, for a full-time employee, 65 percent of the family. Anything less than that, you are going to be hit by a surcharge.
You know, the reality is that oftentimes small businesses just--I mean, if you are struggling just to keep your doors open, and you get hit with a payroll tax, it's not like an income tax, that if you make a profit, you pay the tax.
This is, you are going to pay this whether you are losing money or not. This is whether or not you are going to have to lay off employees or not. It's a very bad direction to go, and it's certainly not in the Republican version. It's, unfortunately, in the Democrat version that we will be voting on later this week.
I think it's about a couple of inches thick, would be my guess. The manager's amendment to the cap-and-trade, I think, was several hundred pages. I am speculating, but this is double the size of cap-and-trade. So let's go for 600 pages.
Thank you, Congresswoman Lummis.
One of the things that concerns me is how seniors are treated in this bill, and I think you certainly mentioned some of the things. But half of the bill is paid for by cuts to Medicare, roughly half, and that is stripping hundreds of billions of dollars out of the Medicare system. So a couple of things concern me.
There are going to be cuts certainly to Medicare Advantage. Many of the 10 million seniors that we know that are on the Medicare Advantage program will lose their coverage.
But what concerns me is the solvency of the system. If in fact there are savings in the Medicare system through looking at waste, fraud and abuse, as the proponents mention, that money really needs to stay in the Medicare system for seniors, because the actuaries or the trustees of the Medicare system are projecting that Medicare will run out of funding in 2013. So what we ought to be concentrating on, and there seems to be no discussion, is what is going to happen to the seniors in Medicare. Will they simply move into the public option? And then the public option, we defer to bureaucrats in the bill to define what are essentially the procedures, the treatments that are authorized.
So they are going to be making that decision, and on what basis are they going to be making that decision? Is it going to be on the quality-of-life issues in terms of maybe end-of-life care isn't important? We don't know these things. But I think the seniors ought to be real concerned about what is going to happen to their Medicare system, their Medicare plans under this particular proposal.
I thank the gentlewoman from Wyoming for yielding.
One concern certainly that I have is that we are, I think, not focused on all that we have in terms of a safety net. For instance, in my home State of Colorado, there is a high-risk insurance pool called Cover Colorado. We have a premium tax on all insurance products, whether it's health care or it's property and casualty, some of which goes into the general fund, some of which goes into a subsidized health insurance plan for people with preexisting conditions that can't otherwise reasonably get insurance but don't qualify for a public plan because of their income or their assets. So they are covered under this program where they are charged a flat 140 percent of what the average premium cost is in Colorado.
We have 183 community health clinics in Colorado. If you look at the community health provider network Web site for Colorado, they saw over 400,000 patients--not patient visits but patients in the State of Colorado--where they got preventive care, primary care, dental services and mental health services, mostly at taxpayers' expense, all for the uninsured and underinsured. We have Medicaid for the poor and disabled. We have Medicare for the elderly. So there is a tremendous safety net right now. To include emergency room care for those that don't have any form of insurance or are not on a plan and walk in, they're required by law to receive all appropriate screening and subsequent treatment. So I think we need to be aware of what the safety net is right now.