Businesses seek plans for uninsured

Monday, Feb. 16, 2004 | 10:04 a.m.

Kirk Offerle, owner of the Jazzed Cafe & Vinoteca in Las Vegas, has seen his business grow from eight to 20 tables in the last seven years.

And he says the six employees accompanying him in that growth "are like an extended family."

That's why he wishes he could afford to offer them health insurance, for their own well-being and that of their families.

Offerle testified before a legislative subcommittee on health insurance Friday, as the group began laying out a road map for getting more people in the state on insurance plans.

The group, chaired by Assemblywoman Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, wants to come up with a way of helping the state's uninsured -- nearly one in five people under 65, or about 341,000 people -- that won't drain the state's budget. Their self-imposed deadline is July, by which time they want to have a bill in the works for the 2005 Legislature.

This is especially good news for those who work in small businesses like Offerle's, where less than half of all workers fail to enroll in insurance plans through their employers, according to Vance A. Hughey, chief principal research analyst of the Legislative Counsel Bureau, in testimony to the group. It would also be good for Hispanics, a third of whom are uninsured, Hughey said.

The group's idea is to identify county dollars that could be used to leverage federal dollars in matching grant funds, as well as unspent federal dollars from a state health insurance program for children, and use these funds to lower insurance premiums for businesses and their employees.

"It's not that (small) business owners don't want to cover their employees," said Sen. Ray Rawson, R-Las Vegas, a member of the subcommittee.

"It's that they can't afford to."

Gretchen Engquist and Peter Burns of EP & P Consulting will be helping the subcommittee determine where money could be found to pool together small businesses and how to get more people insured.

They have helped engineer similar plans in other states.

Engquist said about $70 million unmatched by federal dollars exists in the state's different counties.

The idea would be to see if money can be taken out of certain programs without interrupting services and use it in other programs that could bring federal dollars back to the state. Some of those federal dollars could then be put back in the programs, or different programs with similar purposes. Others could be used for leveraging health insurance plans for the uninsured.

Additionally, Engquist said, about $91 from the State Children Health Insurance Program, or S-CHIP -- which are also federal funds -- may not be used over the next five years.

Some of this money might also be available for expanding health insurance coverage.

"There's a certain art and finesse in converting some of your state and county dollars into federal dollars," Burns said to the subcommittee.

Buckley said: "This is a no-brainer -- why wouldn't we want to bring back more federal dollars to provide more health insurance?"

The group wants to find out more about the state's uninsured, where they work, how much money might be available for matching federal funds (and where), and the ease with which these funds could be transferred without interrupting services -- by its next meeting March 12.

Offerle wished them luck. He said he knows his employees are hurt by not having insurance.

"If they're at work worrying about a sick child at home, I would assume their productivity would go down.

"Being a small business owner ... you end up caring about (employees) and would like to make their lives better, as well as your own," he said. Ray Rawson