Snowe Aims to Help Small Businesses Find Healthcare Coverage

Increasing healthcare coverage for small businesses in America will help solve the healthcare crisis, according to Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). Yesterday in a roundtable discussion with the Senate Finance Committee, Snowe argued that limiting healthcare coverage to firms with ten or fewer employees will result in the failure to cover the 26 million uninsured Americans who work for firms with less than a hundred employees.

"Lack of access to affordable health care coverage is a huge crisis for the small business community in Maine and across the country," said Snowe. "If we exclude action to address dysfunctional small group insurance markets from health reform legislation, then we are going to leave 52 percent of the uninsured behind."

Snowe is now moving to reintroduce the Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) Act, which permits small businesses and the self-employed to work together, across state lines, to secure affordable coverage and find ways to reduce administrative costs.

"The simple truth is that reform is going to require we realize savings – both to reduce the high burden of health care costs and to enable us to assist those who truly need help to access care,” Snowe added. “We must not ignore promising measures such as SHOP which can make fundamental improvement in coverage without increasing deficits. This is simply a common sense reform."