Health care reform *is* a jobs bill

I generally try to stay away from politics in public, but I'm going to make an exception for a moment. In all the brouhaha over health care reform, we seem to have missed what I think is an important aspect of the debate: Health insurance benefits are a significant cost of having employees. Whether you support the current bill in Congress or not (and I admit, I have reservations of my own) please consider the issues I raise in the following letter I sent to my Representative, Congressman Michael McCaul.

Dear Congressman McCaul:

I'm writing to let you know that I support health insurance reform, and I hope you will reconsider your opposition.

I don't know why the Democrats haven't framed the debate this way, but I see health care reform as a jobs issue. I've been out of work for over a year now. Prior to the layoff, my former employer had to raise the employee portion of insurance costs and institute a non-smoker discount to keep some kind of control over costs. I don't know what portion of the costs the company picked up, but I know it had to be a considerable expense at a time when everybody was trying to cut expenses as much as possible. A few years ago they opened call centers in Canada, in part because health benefits were taken care of by the Canadian government. Our for-profit health care system is one factor that drives jobs out of the country.

During my unemployment, I considered starting my own business. That's all well and good, but how do I get insurance? Apparently, even my self-diagnosed ailment, which I mentioned to my doctor once, qualifies as a pre-existing condition to the insurance companies. And if health care costs are problematic for a Fortune 50 company, imagine what it's like for small businesses. During my sojourn into entrepreneurship, I've talked to a number of small businesses. Benefit costs are a huge factor in their decisions to create new jobs, or maintain the jobs they already have. One had to wrestle with the decision over whether or not to keep a valuable employee because his family had overwhelming health care costs after an accident, driving up insurance costs for the entire company. My inability to get health coverage was one factor in my not continuing to pursue my own business. I didn't create any jobs this past year. Not one.

Don't get me wrong. There are aspects of this bill that are troubling to me, namely the individual mandate. I don't think it's actually a legitimate power of Congress to insist on telling me where to spend my money. But the status quo can't stand. If the individual mandate is overturned, the rest of reform--consumer protections against predatory insurance companies and their abuses for instance--will continue. And maybe someday, we'll get the public option necessary to actually fix this mess. For right now, the important thing is to get some kind of reform.

I understand that your party is foursquare against this. Frankly, I'm baffled by that stance. Giving government subsidies to businesses to help them grow and thereby grow tax revenues is in the grand tradition of Post-Reagan Republicanism and supply-side economics. If it weren't pushed by Democrats, I'd expect Republicans to be all over that kind of corporate support. In my opinion, this is little more than partisan game playing.

Yes, it will be expensive. So were the Bush Tax Cuts. Why wouldn't the arguments to justify the Bush Tax Cuts apply to health care reform? Republicans have proven that they are willing to increase the deficit for something that is worthwhile. Cutting down the power of insurance companies to get between me and my doctor, cutting the costs of health care, and making it easier for businesses, large and small, to create jobs is worth it. Putting people back to work so they can start paying taxes again and helping the corporate bottom line to grow revenues is worth it.

Your constituents, and the corporations that employ them, are counting on you to place our well-being over partisan game-playing. Please support reform.

Thank you.