Newsmax Finance Insider Susan Solovic told Newsmax TV that the Republican Party’s proposed health care overhaul will eventually be a blessing for small businesses.
Solovic spoke just as the second of two key congressional committees cleared the Republican health care bill, moving the legislation to repeal and change many key parts of Obamacare a step closer to a full vote in the House of Representatives.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee, after a 27-hour session that saw tempers flare as Democrats tried to delay the legislation, approved the bill by a 31-23 vote with only minor changes, Bloomberg reported.
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The vote came after the Ways and Means Committee wrapped up 18 hours of debate on its piece of the proposal, which it passed without any changes. The two measures will be combined and sent to the Budget Committee before heading to the floor.
The bill, the American Health Care Act, would repeal Obamacare’s requirement that individuals have, and employers offer, health coverage and would eliminate many taxes on the wealthy, insurers and drugmakers used to fund Obamacare.
The proposal includes a refundable, age-based tax credit to help people buy insurance and a wind-down of an expansion of Medicaid over a period of years.
Solovic, who blogs for Newsmax Finance as "THE" Small-Business Expert, described the GOP bill to "Newsmax Prime" as far from perfect but a “good first step.”
“From a tax perspective, it is a big help for small businesses,” the New York Times best-selling author and special advocate for the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) told host Miranda Khan.
“First of all, there’s going to be competition. Offering competition, of course, is going to drive the cost down, but getting rid of the employer mandate is critical,” Solovic explained.
“I’ve talked to so many small businesses along the way and they have kept their employment under that 50 employee threshold on purpose,” she said.
“I also believe that’s why we’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurial activity like actually diminish over the last 5-6 years, it’s because people are afraid to accelerate their growth,” she said.
“They were doing everything that they could to avoid that mandate. The individual mandate going away, the employer mandate going away is going to be a huge boom for small businesses,” she said.
Meanwhile, critics of the plan are worried people will forgo insurance without a mandate and that only the sickest will sign up.
The Republican bill attempts to address that by allowing insurers to charge people as much as a 30 percent surcharge if they don’t maintain continuous coverage, though that may not be enough to entice younger, healthier people to buy insurance.
(Newsmax wires services contributed to this report).
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