Posted by Kristin Oberlander - As this year's Cover the Uninsured Week starts to wind down, I am encouraged that we will see major steps in reform for the working uninsured. And that's a nice place to be.
With over 60 percent of Americans living without health insurance coming from a family where the head of household works for a small business, the NASE routinely supports efforts, like Cover the Uninsured Week, to inform folks about their coverage options from federal or state programs.
The NASE conducts several online polls of our members each year. Recently, we asked micro-businesses to speak up about their health care situation. It's nothing new that many people, not just the self-employed, struggle to pay their premium costs. However, we found that one quarter of micro-business owners are currently uninsured, and almost three-quarters (71 percent) have been uninsured at some time.
While corporations are able to deduct health insurance premiums as a business expense and forego FICA (Social Security and Medicare) taxes on these expenses, the self-employed are not. As I mentioned in last week’s blog post, The Equity for Our Nation's Self-Employed Act (H.R. 1470) would eliminate this double digit disparity in the tax code, which inhibits the self-employed from receiving a full deduction for health insurance costs.
Cover the Uninsured links: