House and Senate healthcare reform bills major step forward

The House tri-committee and Senate HELP healthcare reform bills unveiled this week are a major step forward in fixing our nation's broken healthcare system. We commend the committees' efforts to bring us to this point.

There is no question that America's 27 million small business owners are desperate for healthcare reform. Small Business Majority recently finished polling randomly selected small business owners in 16 states across the country, the vast majority of whom are either struggling to or cannot afford health insurance at all, and also agree that reform is urgently needed to fix the US economy.

No healthcare reform bill will ever be perfect or satisfy everyone, but defeat of healthcare reform helps no one, and would have disastrous consequences for small businesses across the country. While we believe there is still work to be done on some of the details, we're encouraged by the overall framework and the clarification of some of the provisions designed to support small business.

Economic research we released in June shows that without healthcare reform, small business owners will pay nearly $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years in healthcare costs for their employees. Clearly, the cost of doing nothing is too high, and is simply not an option. It's imperative that we all work constructively with Congress to see this through.