Small Business Health-insurance Dilemma
Jul 21, 2009 Economy, Health Care, News
This morning I participated along with Sen. John Marty in a press conference focusing on a study by US PIRG on the dilemma small businesses find themselves in finding access to health care for their employees.
We stood outside Tracy Singleton’s Birchwood Café in Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis, and visited with her, John Kolstad of the Metro Independent Business Alliance and John Stewart of US PIRG. Stewart read from the report and the rest of us responded and talked about the Minnesota Health Plan and our efforts to pass it in the House and Senate.
Reporter Casey Selix from MinnPost published the following story about the event:
U.S. PIRG offers ‘human snapshot’ of small businesses’ health-insurance dilemma
When Tracy Singleton opened the Birchwood Café 14 years ago, she was able to offer health insurance to all full-time and part-time employees. Today, she can only afford to offer coverage to full-time workers at the organic eatery.
“Every year, the costs kept going up, going up, going up — double digits like 22 percent; 26 percent was the highest,” Singleton said today at a press conference in front of her café in Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood. “What that means is that every year you have to spend a whole lot of time shopping around to find the most-affordable health care plan for my employees. And what that means is that I’m trying to mitigate the cost to them because I can only pay 50 percent. … To mitigate the cost to them means we have to lower the actual plan they’re getting. So, they’re getting these high-deductible plans with not very much benefit.”
To read the rest of the article and read the report in a pdf file click (here)
