Health Care and Jumpstarting the Economy: It's Time to Use All the Gears We Got

As health care costs have spiraled upward, small business owners have been forced to choose between taking on the rate increases or cutting benefits for their employees. It doesn't have to be that way, say Jim Houser and Liz Dally, co-owners of the Hawthorne Auto Clinic in Portland, Oregon. A public option for health insurance would allow for more people to spread out more risk, lowering costs and helping employers to free up more money for paying employees.

by Liz Dally and Jim Houser, Hawthorne Auto Clinic, Inc.

Health care is a major issue for small business owners like us, especially in the auto repair business. We’re in a high-skill field where being able to offer good benefits to keep good people is very important. Plus, we’re an aging profession (have you noticed recently that your mechanic isn’t quite as young as she/he used to be?). These factors make health care critically important for us.

We offer health care for all our regular employees and their families, but the premiums far outstrip any reasonable cost for what we receive. We’re paying over $80,000 a year now for health coverage. That’s a truckload of money. The rates keep going up and up, 10 percent or more a year, so we don’t have the money to provide well-deserved raises and other benefits.

What should be done about it? Well, here’s what we think: Health care isn’t like auto repair. Things like fixing a car fit fine in the private sector. But essential services like firefighting, police services, utilities and health care shouldn’t be left up to “market forces”. Too many of us are at the mercy of the insurance companies’ drive for profits, especially small businesses that don’t have bargaining power.

That’s why we support giving everyone the choice of a public health insurance plan. Anybody who likes what they’ve got now, fine, keep it. But for those who are struggling to find decent coverage we can afford, give us a new choice – a real choice – choice of a public health insurance plan. By pooling together, we could finally get the kind of numbers to spread risk and the leverage to drive down costs.

This seems like common sense to us. But some in Congress have raised the question of whether the public health insurance option has enough bi-partisan support to pass. Why shouldn’t it? All of us – Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike – are for more choice in health care.

To limit our choices, at a time when so many of us aren’t getting real choices in the private market, that makes as much sense as driving down the highway at 65 miles an hour in low gear, just because you’ve decided never to use high gear. It doesn’t do you, or your car, any good. Limiting our choices in health care by taking the choice of a public health plan off the table won’t do us any good, either.

Liz Dally and Jim Houser co-own Hawthorne Auto Clinic, Inc. a local auto repair garage in southeast Portland.