Many are happy that the Supreme Court largely upheld the Affordable Care Act. But not everyone. In fact, the National Federation of Independent Business, (N.F.I.B.), the small-business trade association, is looking for repeal, or replacement.
Granted, the N.F.I.B. found much to like in the Affordable Care Act. It was their group, after all, that helped write the bill that resulted in insurance exchanges, where small companies could compare and then buy insurance coverage for their employees, according to Robb Mandelbaum. But not much else. It was the N.F.I.B. who was the lead plaintiff in the case challenging the law.
The organization did not mince words. In a press release distributed right after the decision, “This day will go down in history as the day when Americans lost a part of their freedom – the freedom to choose what they want to buy with their own money,” Karen Harned, executive director of NFIB’s Small Business Legal Center stated.
Mandelbaum reports that the group realizes that repeal is unlikely, certainly before the election. It’s also not calling for a switch in strategy since members are “likely to be supporting Republicans hostile to the health law anyway.”
So the group plans to spend the next four months pressuring candidates for Congress — Democrats and Republicans alike, Mandelbaum writes, and he adds that the federation’s chief executive, Dan Danner, in the interview, rehearsed a question the group planned to pose to a Democratic senator in a very tight race for re-election about the individual mandate, asking if is she okay with “an enormous new tax on largely the middle class and young people?”
Danner told Mandelbaum the mandate would affect the federation’s self-employed members — about 16 percent of the group’s membership, according to Kevin Kuhlman, a manager for legislative affairs at the federation – and would force other small business owners who could not afford insurance to buy it.
Apart from seeing the individual mandate removed, the organization would like to repeal an annual fee on health insurers that Senate Democrats drafted to help pay for the overhaul. “The tax will primarily be on healthcare plans in the small group market, where our guys are,” Danner told Mandelbaum, “so we’re pretty confident that that $87 billion gets passed directly down to the small businesses purchasing healthcare.”
The Congressional Budget Office has also said that insurers will pass the cost of the fee to customers in premiums.
And the group plans to push other changes. “We’d still like to see expanded, not diminished, use of health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts, because they’re largely taken off the table in the law,” Danner commented.
Edited by
Jamie Epstein
