James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center outlined the Senate Republican proposal to reform health care Tuesday on America's Newsroom, beginning with a repeal of Obamacare's mandate and its taxes and allowing small business employers to band together to buy health insurance.
Capretta explained that gives small business owners a means of leveraging their market power.
"A lot of small businesses are out there negotiating on their own," he said. "If you have 100 employees, you can't get quite the deal that you can get if you have 10,000 employees. So if you band a lot of small businesses together, allow them to work with an insurance company and a broker, they can get better deals for their insurance premiums and also negotiate lower prices from the providers, the hospitals and the doctors that are serving their workers."
While it's allowed to some degree currently, such activity would be more facilitated by the Republican proposal, Capretta said, and the Republican reforms would not have Obamacare's "big government baggage." He called the proposal a much more de-centralized approach than Obamacare and argued it would slowing costs and expanding coverage, in addition to giving Americans more personal power over their insurance policies.
Host BIll Hemmer pointed out one of the important facets of the plan was the tax credit for individuals, which households control to purchase insurance.
"It's important because there are lots of Americans below about 300 percent of the poverty line and above about 100 percent of the poverty line, who are working, actually have jobs, doing the right thing, trying to make a living for their families, but don't have good access to health care today because either their employer doesn't offer it or they can't afford it," Capretta said. "So this credit would allow these workers to buy insurance on their own, out in the marketplace, buying the same kind of commercial insurance everybody else gets, and give them the financial wherewithal to make sure they can get at least some kind of insurance."