House lawmakers took an aggressive approach to healthcare reform in two separate hearings held on September 18.
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health considered the urgent need for healthcare reform, while the House Committee on Small Business reviewed how healthcare reform could work for small businesses.
At the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine said the presidential election could allow for good changes, as both candidates agree on many principles.
"Both candidates want to expand access to care, to contain healthcare costs, to build healthcare IT infrastructure and to encourage preventative care," Corzine said. "Those themes represent major common ground from which to work toward national health reform."
Corzine said healthcare reform is possible, "but it requires a strong and committed federal-state partnership premised on a willingness to build upon what’s working and a commitment to the attainability of that ultimate goal, universal care."
Elizabeth Edwards, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said health reform will be most successful when the goal is to achieve coverage for all and cost containment at the same time.
"In fact, the two are on different sides of the same Rubik's Cube," she said. "We'll only solve both problems at the same time, and I would encourage the committee to think about health reform as a need to aggressively pursue both."
At the House Committee on Small Business hearing on making healthcare reform work for small businesses, Linda J. Blumberg, principal research associate at the Urban Institute, said small employers face substantial disadvantages over large employers when providing health insurance to their employees.
"These problems can largely be summarized as higher administrative costs of insurance, limited ability to spread healthcare risk and a workforce with lower wages," Blumberg said. "All of these problems must be addressed if insurance coverage is to increase significantly among workers in small firms."
Allowing small employers and individuals to buy coverage through organized purchasing pools, state or federal employees benefit plans could provide more efficient purchasing, Blumberg said.
Len M. Nichols, director of health policy at the New America Foundation, said small employers will always hold a large stake in conversations about healthcare reform because no single group is more important to the American economy and society.
"Small employers have long suffered from high administrative loads (and therefore high premiums), little effective competition (and therefore rapidly rising premiums), and increasingly intense competition from large domestic firms and foreign competitors," Nichols said.
"Thus, it is clear that health reforms focused on increasing access to quality, affordable health coverage for small businesses could serve as an important and catalytic step for changes nationwide," he added.