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August 12: Health Care Dominates WCPN's Congressional Town Hall Meeting

August 17, 2009
“I am one member that is dedicated to helping our small businesscommunity obtain competitive and very good coverage,” she said inresponse to a question. “The way in which businesses have anopportunity to access insurance in the bill is a work in progress. Nonetheless, the bill does have some major provisions that suggest howthis can happen—either they can keep the plan they have or in theinsurance exchange they can opt in, select from there, or go into thenon-profit plan that is created on the exchange.

“There are some pretty serious disincentives in the bill … todiscourage existing businesses from dumping their insured populationsinto the not-for-profit plan and frankly that is one part of the billthat needs a lot of intense scrutiny to make sure it is working forall. I have a very high priority in my mind to develop a plan that istruly workable for small business.”

Congresswoman Kaptur stressed the importance of everyone having “amedical home” in order to prevent cost shifting, which is inefficient. “In my district, almost 57,000 people have no health insurance,” shesaid, noting that emergency room care is particularly expensive…Exorbitant costs are riddled through the system when people don’t havea medical home. It costs all of us in the end. If they don’t haveinsurance, the cost of their care is shifted to other plans.”

The House version of health care reform would mean “if you haveinsurance, you can keep it,” she said. “The most important step onecan take is to make sure that you belong to a plan . . . that you infact have a medical home. I’m not satisfied, though I’m trying, to getthis concept of responsible group management into this bill … Justbecause you belong to a plan doesn’t mean that plan is well managed.”

Hosted by Dan Multhrop, “The Sound of Ideas” is an award-winning publicaffairs radio program on WCPN, which covers not only Cleveland, butalso the eastern portion of the Ninth Congressional District, includingLorain and Erie counties.

A podcast of "A Congressional Townhall Meeting" can be heard at https://www.wcpn.org/index.php/WCPN/soi/27396/