Overhaul Divides Business and Its Traditional GOP Allies

The Business Roundtable, the US Chamber of Commerce and others are telling the GOP they must have health insurance reform. This may get even more interesting once we start hearing from more businesses who see health insurance at a crisis point.

In particular business groups like the Baucus plan because they see its attempts to control skyrocketing medical costs. Business appears to understand this much better than most of Congress. Now that we have had public town hall forums with citizens, perhaps congressional decision-makeers will start to listen to employers who actually provide 60% of insurance coverage in the US.

The Baucus plan is by no means perfect but it does attempt to control costs and does establish a health insurance exchange for small businesses.

---------------- ------------------ ---------------
From the Wall Street Journal- Setp. 25th
By NEIL KING JR.
WASHINGTON -- Business is parting from its traditional allies in the Republican Party on health care as companies and big corporate lobbyists lend tentative support to a congressional overhaul that conservative lawmakers staunchly oppose.

The rift mirrors a similar divide on other issues, including immigration and climate change, where many companies have backed legislative action that Republican lawmakers oppose.

But the health-care debate, in particular, casts a spotlight on the split in the longstanding alliance between economic conservatives and the business community. Republican lawmakers are digging in to oppose the overhaul effort as a big-spending government intrusion. Many companies, on the other hand, cite soaring costs to explain why they continue to back the congressional work under way to revamp the health-care system, despite misgivings over a range of provisions.

"We are now at a crisis point," said Joe Olivo, who has struggled to keep up with rising health costs as the president of Perfect Printing Inc., a 40-employee printing company in Moorestown, N.J.

Mr. Olivo is apprehensive about many proposed Democratic fixes, above all the push to create a government-run insurance program. But he said he was also "disappointed that the Republicans don't seem to be at the table at all."

The business world this summer largely recoiled from legislation put forward in the House, which would mandate that employers provide employee coverage and would create a public insurance option.

But companies have been far more receptive to the plan released last week by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus. The Baucus bill, which the committee is now busy amending, wouldn't include an employer mandate. It proposes a national exchange where individuals and small businesses could purchase insurance.

Just as Sen. Baucus was preparing to unveil his plan, the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group that represents major U.S. multinationals, released a study arguing that congressional inaction was not an option.

The study found that without any changes to the current system, the cost to insure a single employee, including the person's own out-of-pocket expenses, would jump to more than $28,000 a year by 2019, from around $11,000 a year now.

"The status quo is a prescription for failure," said Eastman Kodak Co. Chief Executive Antonio Perez, who heads the group's health initiative, in a statement endorsing the study. Mr. Perez, who declined to comment further, gave a plug in his statement for the Baucus bill, calling it "a bold framework...that builds on what works and improves what doesn't."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents about three million businesses of all sizes, has run television ads opposing the Democratic-led health-care push. And the chamber, like many other big business groups in Washington, has many concerns about the Baucus bill, particularly the taxes it proposes to help pay for its $774 billion Congressional Budget Office price tag over 10 years.

But the chamber applauded much of the Baucus bill as the first proposal "that will actually...get health-care costs under control." "The reality with the business community is that we want reform, while some Republicans want to stop this train and start over," said Bruce Josten, the chamber's chief lobbyist. "That is just not going to happen."

Republican lawmakers predicted that businesses would soon sour on the Senate health-care package as Democrats heap on various amendments.

"I wouldn't confuse pleasant noises about the Baucus bill with an endorsement," said Republican Rep. David Camp of Michigan. "If this bill tacks left, which it is already doing, business won't support it."

Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander said he wasn't disturbed by the interest shown by business groups in the Baucus bill. "They've got a right to say what they think," he said.

Sen. Alexander noted that "one of the ironies" in the debate was that while President Barack Obama often promises to reduce the role of special interests in policy-making, "most of the special interests are for the bill." He pointed specifically to drug makers.

Republicans have been particularly furious at the pharmaceutical industry, whose early willingness to cooperate with the White House and with Sen. Baucus proved crucial in keeping the push for an overhaul alive this summer. In June, the drug makers' lobbying group, PhRMA, cut a surprise deal with Mr. Baucus, offering to slash $80 billion in drug costs in exchange for a range of protections from the government.

That deal was shortly followed by the announcement of $150 billion in concessions by the hospital industry.

House Republican leader John Boehner blasted the PhRMA deal in a letter to the group's president, Billy Tauzin, a former Republican lawmaker.

"We have been criticized by people from both ends of the political spectrum, but we remain convinced that we are doing the right thing," said PhRMA spokesman Ken Johnson. "If health-care reform is going to be successful, it will require a shared sacrifice -- and, in our case, a stiff upper lip."