Ron Kind: “Madam Speaker, there is a serious problem throughout America in regards to the rising cost of health insurance…”

“Madam Speaker, there is a serious problem throughout America in regards to the rising cost of health insurance, double-digit premium increases. As I travel around my congressional district in western Wisconsin visiting businesses large and small alike, it is the number one topic on their lips, the difficulty of being able to provide health insurance coverage for their employees with the double-digit increases that they are facing today. Part of the problem in western Wisconsin deals with the inadequacy of Medicare reimbursement rates, which then is cost-shifted on to the private plans; but also part of the problem is the number of uninsured and the cost shifting that occurs when they receive treatment. We saw the statistics a little earlier, 41 million uninsured. Those numbers are going up. Between 50 and 60 percent of the uninsured are employees working in small businesses. It is a crisis situation out there, and I have not met a small business owner yet that is happy with the fact when they cannot provide some basic health coverage for their employees.”