Rep. Kline’s remarks at Obama’s health care reform summit

Rep. John Kline was one of nine House Republicans — and the only Minnesotan — at President Obama’s bipartisan health care reform summit Thursday. Kline spoke about the Republican plan to create small business associations to pool health insurance coverage for employees. It’s a similar plan to one already offered by Obama and Democrats: They have proposed insurance exchanges for small businesses as well as $40 billion in tax cuts to offset the costs of insuring their employees.

Here is the full text of Kline’s remarks on Thursday:

KLINE: Thank you, Leader.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I think that Senator Alexander framed our overall position very well when he said that we’re looking at thousands of pages of legislation, and we believe a better approach is to go step by step to address these issues of cost.

We certainly agree that you get better economies of scale if you can come together. We have proposed, in both the House and the Senate — in fact, for a number of years — that small businesses be able to band together in small-business health plans or association health plans.

We all know, and I’ve heard everybody say here, that small businesses are the engine that drives our economy. We also know that about half of the uninsured either work for small businesses or depend upon somebody who does.

And so we believe that we ought to address that issue by allowing these small businesses to band together in the same way that I think, Mr. President, you mentioned large companies do. And I mean really the same way, so that they get all the advantages of, if they self- insure, being able to avoid the 50-state mandates; being able to lower their administrative costs because they’re not having to deal with that.

And it will lower the cost of premiums for these small businesses and allow them to insure more people and to keep people that are already insured on the books, because we all know — we all know stories like we’ve heard here of small businesses that are saying “I can no longer provide insurance for my employees.”

Small businesses have been asking for this for years. It’s not a new idea. They’ve been asking for it for years. And we think it’s a far better way to get these economies of scale than the exchange thing that’s in the huge — that’s in the huge bill, that this will actually allow businesses to be able to lower their costs exactly the same way that large businesses do.