Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-La.) speaks about how our nation’s current health care system offers some of the best care in certain U.S. cities, but prices are escalating for small businesses around the country. (0:25)
By Aaron Richardson – Talk Radio News Service
Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Chairwoman Mary Landrieu (D-La.) along with Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) held a roundtable discussion Thursday to tackle the issue of what Congress can do to ensure that heath care reform legislation extends to small businesses.
“Every time I talk to small business people they say we want to do something for our folks. Just don’t make it some kind of federal tax or fee that put’s us out of business.” said Wyden.
Small business representatives from all over the U.S. including Amanda Austin, Director of Federal Policy for the Senate with the National Federation of Independent Businesses and Lin Nichols, the Director of Health Policy for the New America Foundation participated in the discussion.
“We have been very pleased with a lot of the discussion around insurance market reform and really bending the overall cost curve to really find savings at the end of the day that can provide real coverage options. But we need to be very careful about the how we approach the smallest firms and the burdens that we put on them at the end of the day.” said Austin.
When asked by Snowe how Congress plans on creating universal health coverage without any sort of mandate, Nichols replied, “I don’t know how you do it without an individual mandate, you have got to require people to do it. Then you have to make it affordable for people who can’t afford it.”
At a hearing on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) post-catastrophe housing planning, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.) says that it is hard not to conclude that someone instructed details not to be filled in the report. Landrieu says the law required FEMA in clear terms to come up with strategies but FEMA merely turned in a late report with blank paper. (0:46)
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) submitted a strategy plan which was a year overdue to the Disaster Recovery Subcommittee, according to Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.). Landrieu added that not only was the strategy late but key annexes of the report, required by Congress, were nothing but blank pages. (more…)
