Monday, March 15, 2004 | 9:43 a.m.
Business advocates and a few politicians aired concerns Friday about a proposal to use federal money to help provide health care to small-business workers.
Representatives from the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and the Nevada chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business said they're worried about creating a system that would rely on federal dollars that could be cut off.
Christina Dugan, director of government affairs for the chamber, said the program could create an "unknown future tax liability" for Nevada if the federal government cut the funds and Nevada had to pick up the bill.
Also on Friday Assembly candidate Ed Gobel announced that he and state Sen. Ray Shaffer, R-North Las Vegas, will push a bill with a simpler idea to pool all small businesses together so they could afford to provide insurance to their employees.
That would cut the number of uninsured people in Nevada without tapping into unstable federal funds, Gobel argued.
"This federal money could run out in four or five years," he said.
If the state gathered at least 10,000 small-business employees to participate, Gobel said, it would reduce their premiums by at least 60 percent compared with what they would pay if they bought insurance on their own.
The idea of using federal money to supplement small-business health care came up in February, when legislators announced they had hired a consulting company to help them find ways to insure small-business employees in Nevada.
An estimated 22.3 percent of Nevadans are uninsured, compared with the 17.2 percent of people uninsured nationally, according to figures presented to a legislative subcommittee studying health insurance.
Many of those people are employees of small businesses, which often cannot afford to insure their employees.
More than 38 percent of Nevadans who work for companies with 10 or fewer employees are uninsured, compared with just 10 percent of uninsured people who work for companies of 1,000 employees or more.
The health subcommittee, led by Assemblywoman Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, has asked the consultants to look into the idea of pooling small businesses together to reduce health care costs and using federal funds to keep the costs low.
Employees would pay 30 percent of their premiums, employers would pay another 30 percent and the state would tap into unused federal funds from the State Children's Health Insurance Program to cover the rest of the costs.
Randy Robison, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, said his group would prefer that legislators pool companies together and then ask insurance companies to offer competitive bids to provide coverage.
The group would like that free market strategy better than any program that would rely federal funds, he said.
But Buckley said the state should find a way to utilize that unused money now. An estimated $91 million will go to other states in the next five years if Nevada doesn't find a way to use it.
"I think everyone on the committee would like to see the free market take care of itself," Buckley said. "But it hasn't yet."
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