I am a small businessman and I and 27.2 million other small businessmen like me are important to the survival of our nation’s very existence sir, and we need you to hear us out about healthcare reform.
How important are we?
How important are small businesses to
the U.S. economy?
Small firms:
• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
• Employ about half of all private sector employees.
• Pay nearly 45 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually
over the last decade.
• Create more than half of nonfarm private gross domestic
product (GDP).
• Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists,
engineers, and computer workers).
There is more on the jump
• Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
• Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced
28.9 percent of the known export value in FY 2006.
• Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large
patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large
firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census and International
Trade Administration; Advocacy-funded research by Kathryn Kobe, 2007
(www.sba.gov/advo/research/rs299tot.pdf) and CHI Research, 2003 (www.
sba.gov/advo/research/rs225tot.pdf); Federal Procurement Data Sy
Some time during WWII when federal law froze salaries, companies found many ways to keep key people or entice new people to come aboard. One of the major enticements was to give them non-cash, non-salary benefits. Overwhelming, health insurance became the most popular enticement. Since then big business and small business have assumed the burden of providing health care to the majority of Americans.
We are not mandated to provide health, life or dental insurance. It has become an expected benefit of employment. But sir, that is a fixin to change.
As for me, that change will not come this year, but probably in July of 2010, when I’ll face another double digit increase in my group’s health care costs. You see sir; I’ve faced this for 7 consecutive years. In addition to that sir, many of my competitors have already dropped their health insurance benefits. In my case sir, health care costs represent 9% of my cost of services. Today, I have 3 direct competitors who don’t have that healthcare line item expense; they in affect will be able to out bid me by 9% on any job we go head to head on.
I’ll have to make a very difficult and emotional decision in July of 2010. And what will my employees do? They’ll not have much choice here sir. With a negative job growth recovery, they’ll decide what the employees of my direct competitors decided; a job without health care insurance is better than no job at all. Without substantive healthcare reform sir, the decision I’ll face next year will be something millions of other employers will be facing.
Sir, I have heard you talk many times about history, and if we don’t learn from history then we are doomed to repeat the mistakes others have made. Respectfully sir, there is also another side of that coin, we can repeat the successes.
In December of 1941, our nation suffered a huge blow, Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt and our country faced the daunting task of rebuilding and retooling our industrial base to meet the needs of a war on 2 fronts.
Roosevelt called America’s small businesses to Washington and they put their heads and hearts together to get this country moving. In a little over a year, we were launching a new ship a day, munitions were being manufactured by the millions, tanks and planes were rolling off the assembly lines by the 100’s everyday. They converted their small machine shops to making rifles, munitions or making tank tracks. The drapery manufactures converted their shops to making uniforms. It wasn’t the "Captain’s of Industry" or the huge corporations that moved this country, although they did have their place, it was the 100’s of 1,000’s of small shops across this country that manufactured and supplied the parts that made the whole. As a small businessman, what my fellow patriots achieved in that year and a half is a testament to America’s passion, ingenuity, resolve and entrepreneurial spirit.
Reform needs to be real reform based on facts and the real needs of employees and employers. But sir, what concerns me most are those who are writing this reform? With all due respect sir, as I looked and researched this Committee, I saw only 4 who have any kind of business experience and only 2 who have had their own small businesses. That means maybe 2 faced the challenges of providing health care. But more importantly, on average, these 22 members have not had to worry about their health care for the last 31.27 year. They’ve had the best insurance coverage this country offers, government provide insurance.
I'm certainly not saying that many members of this Committee are not passionate about change and understand the issues at hand. But sir, nothing brings home the urgency or desperation for reform than having to tell you employees that their deductible, co-pay and prescription drug benefits are going up. Or that annual trek to your insurance representative’s office going over the 4-5 "offers" (if you’re lucky) and suffering line item by line item trying to determine what the legalese language really means in coverage.
Senator Max Baucus - age 68 – Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee -- for 39 years Senator Max Baucus has been a civil servant
Charles Ernest "Chuck" Grassley - age 76 - for 51 years Senator Chuck Grassley has been a civil servant
The rest of members of the Senate Finance Committee;
Jay Rockefeller – age 72 - 32 years with government insurance
Kent Conrad – age 61 - 35 years with government insurance
Jeff Bingaman – age 66 – 31 years with government insurance
John F Kerry – age 66 - 37 years with government insurance
Blanche Lincoln – age 49 – 25 years with government insurance
Ron Wyden – age 60 - 31 years with government insurance
Chuck Shumer – age 61 - 35 years with government insurance
Debbie Stabenow – age 49 – (’79-’94 & ’96-’09) 28 years with government insurance
Maria Cantwell– age 51 – (’86-94 & ’00-09) 17 years with government insurance
Bill Nelson – age 67 – (minus ’90 – ’94) - 33 years with government insurance
Robert Menendez - age 55 – 23 years with government insurance
Thomas Carper - age 62 – 34 years with government insurance
Orrin Hatch – age 75 - 33 years with government insurance
Olympia Snowe – age 62- 34 years with government insurance
Jon Kyl – age 67 –23 years with government insurance
Jim Bunning – age 76 – 32 years with government insurance
Mike Crapo - age 58 – 26 years with government insurance
Pat Roberts - age 73 – 42 years with government insurance
John Ensign – age 51 - 13 years with government insurance
John Cornyn – age 57 - 24 years with government insurance
*Civil servant = a combination of one or all - a government employee, state employee or state or federal elected official
Sir, I know you’ve been a member of this body, but sir, I know Washington, I know that it’s not the real world, that Washington does not feel the pain or the urgency the rest of us feel. And without a fix, the uninsured numbers will go up.
Mr President, I pleading here, you have 3 different Commissions/Committees to make recommendations on healthcare reform. Sir, ask small business to come to the table, they’ll work 24/7, they are problem solvers and they’ll be creative and lastly, they won’t leave that table until they’ve finished the job.
As for your opposition party, you'll have little help there, sadly it's about their interests, their party and their power. As far as the insurance industry, the banking industry, the credit card industry, the oil industry and Wall Street they have proven that there is no limit to their greed and the extent they’ll go to keep "their money".
Their America is not my America, but I contend sir, that the love of this country is not dead, it survives in the homes and small businesses across this country. You can do this and repeat one of the successes of a lesson in history.
Update [2009-8-31 1:27:6 by Arkydem]: Thanks for the recommendation. After reading you all's comments I think our problem is our message to small business. If small business provides 38% of the health care benefits to the 147,743 mllion employed (sba 2007 statistic ..that's 56 million Americans who are at risk of lossing their healt care benefits or watch there benefits slowly diminish to insurance that looks like high deductable catastropic health care.
56 million at risk American Workers ... stunning.