Courtney Pushes Health Cost Initiative, The Day

Courtney Pushes Health Cost Initiative

Legislation would help self-employed and small businesses afford insurance

The Day

By Lee Howard

Published on 6/11/2008

U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, joined a bipartisan panel in Washington, D.C., Tuesday to argue for passage of legislation aimed at lowering the cost of health care insurance for small businesses and the self-employed.

Courtney, speaking at a Capitol Hill press conference, said the legislation targets a segment of the health care system that is most broken and should improve the lot of the estimated 47 million Americans who spend some portion of a given year without insurance.

The Small Business Health Options Program - known as the SHOP Act - would allow small businesses and the self-employed to band together to lower insurance premiums. Joining different types of businesses into one pool allows insurers to spread risks over varied populations and should provide lower average premiums than would have been available under a previously introduced bill aimed at the same problem, supporters say.

U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wisc., led the half-hour session that allowed only a few questions from reporters, many of whom attended by teleconference.

”It's clearly one of the most important issues facing business today,” said Kind, who was among the sponsors of the House version of the bill, which closely resembled the Senate's legislation, introduced by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

To get a feel for the problem, supporters released these statistics:

¦ 28.7 percent of the 13.5 million people working for small businesses (with fewer than 100 employees) are uninsured. About 27 percent of the 3.8 million self-employed people are uninsured.

¦ The average annual health-insurance costs for people employed by small businesses (with fewer than 200 employees) last year was $4,553 for singles and $11,835 for families.

¦ Businesses that employ fewer than 200 employees are increasingly less likely to offer health coverage. Such coverage fell from 68 percent of all firms eight years ago to 59 percent last year.

Supporters called the SHOP Act an incremental change, not a step toward national health insurance. They have said that it's up to the next president to decide how to implement a national health care strategy.

The legislation is backed by an interesting coalition of labor and business, including the National Association of Realtors, the AARP and the Service Employees International Union.

Todd Stottlemyer, president and chief executive of the 16-million-member National Federation of Independent Businesses, pointed out that small companies pay an average of 20 percent more for their health care plans than larger firms.

A representative of the national Realtors association said 25 percent of real-estate agents, who are independent contractors, lack health insurance.

Many of the bill's supporters praised the bipartisan support the legislation has received.

”If you want to do anything about health care, it has got to be bipartisan,” Stottlemyer said.

Courtney joins coalition pushing health insurance bill, Journal Inquirer

Courtney joins coalition pushing health insurance bill

By Don Michak

Journal Inquirer

Published: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 12:11 PM EDT

U.S. Rep. Joseph D. Courtney, D-2nd District, on Tuesday joined a bipartisan group of legislators, trade associations, and one of the nation’s biggest unions to push legislation they said would make health insurance more available and affordable for small businesses and the self-employed.

Courtney’s role in the group backing the bill is notable not only because of his longtime interest in health insurance issues — the Vernon lawyer had served a chairman of the General Assembly’s Public Health Committee before he was elected to his first congressional term two years ago — but also because it includes the relatively influential National Federation of Independent Businesses.
NFIB, with offices in Washington, D.C. and all of the 50 states, had supported the Republican incumbent Courtney narrowly unseated in 2006, former Rep. Robert R. Simmons of Stonington.

Courtney said today that while he recalled that during the campaign the NFIB was a “huge Simmons backer” and behind certain direct mail messages that favored his opponent, he believed the organization was most interested today in addressing what he suggested is the most pressing complaint of its members — the soaring costs of health care benefits.
“That part of the health insurance market is broken,” Courtney said. “If you’re self-employed, or if you have a small pool, the rates just kill you because the system doesn’t price the product the same way as larger employer pools or public-employee pools. It just keeps getting worse every year.’”

“It wasn’t that long ago that I was paying the premiums for a seven-person office,” added the congressman. “It’s something I certainly remember very well. And it’s no coincidence that the real estate agents and small machine shops are the ones really complaining the loudest about the huge increase in health care costs.”

The proposed Small Business Health Options Program, which its sponsors call the “SHOP Act,” would permit employers and the self-employed beginning next year to join a state purchasing pool to get lower premiums as well as a tax credit if their states chose to adopt certain “small group” market reforms. By 2011, it would allow small businesses to join a nationwide pool to purchase health insurance.

The legislation would prohibit insurers from using the businesses’ health status and claims experience for both the nationwide pool and the states’ small group markets.

It also would create a Web site offering comparative information about a variety of plans, and permit trade associations and other groups to function as “navigators’ to inform businesses and self-employed.

Supporters of the proposal say it would make insurance cheaper for the 47.1 million employees of the nation’s 5.8 million small businesses and for 14.1 million self-employed individuals.

Accompanying Courtney and the other lawmakers at Tuesday’s Capitol Hill press conference to unveil the bill were representatives of NFIB, as well as from the National Association of Realtors and the Service Employees International Union.

Courtney said today that the “extraordinary coalition” was forged by the need to create an affordable health insurance system.

He said a previous bid by President Bush to create a national insurance pool for small businesses had failed “because his proposal basically would have wiped out state-mandated benefits” and “didn’t provide for any coverage for anything beyond hospital and doctors’ visits.”

“This bill does incorporate existing state-mandated mandates for the national pool, and refers to the National Institutes of Medicine in terms of setting a benefit package,” he added. “That’s a far cry from the Bush proposal in terms of mental health, substance abuse, cancer treatments, Lyme disease treatments — all of the things people have fought for at the state level.”

Courtney acknowledged that the legislation was “obviously, not a way to get to universal coverage,” but said it would “get to the underlying problem.”

“At the end of the day, this country has got to decide what is insurance,” he said. “If insurance is about a product that is designed to avoid risk, that’s not going to fix the problem. People are going to continue to get hurt by something that tries to find a pre-existing condition and sets the cost on a very fragmented market. If the system is based on pooling risk and enlarging the number of people who are insured, then we’ve got a chance to get the cost issue under control.”

Larson, Courtney seek to cut soaring petroleum prices, Journal Inquirer

Larson, Courtney seek to cut soaring petroleum prices

By Don Michak

Journal Inquirer

June 3, 2008

Two area members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation today were expected to introduce bills aimed at cutting soaring petroleum prices by attempting to curb speculation and make more high-grade oil available on the open market.

Speaking Monday outside a Vernon gas station where some grades of gas were selling for more than $4 per gallon, U.S. Rep. John B. Larson, D-1st District, and U.S. Rep Joseph D. Courtney, D-2nd District, said they would seek to ease gasoline and heating oil costs through federal intervention.

The congressmen — flanked by representatives from the Independent Connecticut Petroleum Association, the Wyman Oil Co. in Manchester, and Mitchell Fuel in South Windsor — added that while they welcomed probes of potential oil market manipulation announced last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, more must be done to regulate the traders, investment banks, and hedge funds a congressional committee recently calculated could add as much as $30 to the cost of a barrel of petroleum.

Larson, a former state Senate leader from East Hartford who serves as vice chairman of the House Democratic caucus, said his proposal was aimed at restraining speculators by requiring anyone buying oil futures in an “over-the-counter” transaction to have possession of at least some of the product being traded. He decried the electronic trades that in a few hours can boost the cost of a gallon of gas by as much as 16 cents and net speculators millions of dollars in “paper” profits over a single day.

“The CFTC has been in hibernation for the last seven years,” he said, adding that the relatively little-known regulatory agency “needs to look at” the energy-derivative trading platforms in New York and London operated by IntercontinentalExchange Inc., which has prices tied to oil futures sold by its competitor, the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Speculation in petroleum prices, whether by traders in commodities, futures, or more specialized contracts known as derivatives, needs to be stopped “in its tracks,” Larson said, especially because the rapid acceleration in the cost of gas and heating oil “defies any logic, other than greed.”

“The laws of supply and demand have been suspended,” he added. “When you have over-the-counter trades that are not regulated in Washington, it’s time for the government to step in.”

Courtney agreed with Larson that it’s time to reign in “the Morgan Stanleys and the hedge funds” that “are jumping into the market and adding nothing.”

He also said that since the CFTC disclosed its investigations last Friday, “we’ve already seen a slight moderation” in prices.

But the lawyer from Vernon said he also was proposing legislation that would require the U.S. secretary of energy to exchange 50 million barrels of light crude in the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve with heavier, less refined crude.

That switch, he said, would add a significant amount of higher-grade oil to the market, an action he said was taken in 2000 that cut prices by nearly 20 percent.

Larson and Courtney were joined in Vernon by a fellow Democrat, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who lauded their initiatives as “measures to bring sanity and sense” to a market rife with manipulation.

Blumenthal, who was appearing at his second news conference of the day held at a gas station, called for support for his bid for a special session of the General Assembly to provide relief for gasoline and home heating oil consumers.

But he added that “no single state can combat the rash of national speculation that is engulfing the market.”

Several motorists shouted complaints about the high gasoline prices as they drove past the gathering of politicians and reporters outside the Talcottville Road Citgo station.