Durbin touts health-care plan

During his first visit to Judson University, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin met with local small business owners to discuss new health care legislation aimed to protect the working uninsured.

Heather and James Hills of Elgin-based public relations firm MarketingHelpNet.com, Jason Speer of Schaumburg's Quality FloatWorks, and Christine Klein of Century 21 New Heritage Real Estate in Hampshire were part of a round-table discussion with the senator, functioning, in part, to air their most pressing concerns.

Klein, 38, is considered an independent contractor as a realtor - and therefore does not qualify for any sort of group health insurance.

"I'm single. I pay for a basic major medical plan on my own - but have zero dental, zero eye insurance," she said. "I pay $100 a month right now. If I wanted to add maternity and female coverage - that cost would quadruple."

Speer, whose company has 27 employees, told the senator that his company's health insurance costs have skyrocketed by more than 30 percent in three years.

While Floatworks pays for 65 percent of its employees coverage, workers are left on their own to pay for their dependent.

"We've had four employees withdraw from the plan in the last year because they can't afford it," he said.

While Heather and James said they were pleased with their own Unicare coverage, "many of our friends who make more than us don't have health insurance ... people think that nothing's going to happen to them, but that's just not the case.

Durbin's plan, the Small Business Health Options Program, would allow small businesses to band together in a statewide or nationwide pool to obtain lower health insurance prices by spreading their risk over a larger number of participants.

Each state would continue to oversee its list of minimum requirements for health care.

It would also provide small business owners with annual tax credits of up to $1,000 per employee if they pay for 60 percent of their employees premiums.

Health status ratings would be banned, Durbin said, in order to protect businesses from large rate increases just because employees get sick.

"You have this image of who the insured are and its just wrong," he said, pointing to National Association of Realtors statistics which show 25 percent of all realtors have no health insurance.

Other legislation to give small business owners better health insurance options has stalled in Congress in recent years - only supported by members of one political party or another.

Durbin boasts that his plan is bipartisan, backed by Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Norm Coleman and Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln.

With the upcoming election, the plan likely won't be implemented this year, Durbin said.

Still, he said, the clock is ticking. "The next president can't avoid this issue," he said, calling the country's insured the "lucky few."