JIM HOUSER IS TAKING a two-day break from fixing cars to fly
to Washington, DC, this week, where he’ll be asking Oregon’s
legislators to support the president’s vision for health care reform.
Co-owner of the Hawthorne Auto Clinic since 1983, Houser spends $80,000
a year to provide insurance for nine of his 15 employees and their
families.
“This is a very high-skilled industry,” Houser explains, gesturing
to a wall of his mechanics’ framed photographs and their maintenance
certificates above a fish tank in the waiting area of his business on
SE Hawthorne and 43rd. “So one of the things you do is keep your
skilled employees here, and that means keeping them healthy and looking
after their families.”
Houser’s idealistic approach to human resources may have been
realistic in 1983, but lately he’s been struggling to cope with
rocketing premiums.
“In the ’80s and ’90s the cost of health insurance would rise three
to five percent every year,” he says. “But starting in 2001, it went up
six or seven percent a year, then 10 to 12 percent, then two years ago
it went up 18 percent. And all of a sudden what was just another
expense really gets your attention when you need to buy new tools and
equipment and do repairs to a 100-year-old building.”
The high cost doesn’t cover Houser’s interns from Mount Hood
Community College, either. When one student got a knee injury and had
to go on the Oregon Health Plan recently, he ended up dropping out of
Houser’s sponsorship program. “We invest in these students, we sponsor
them and put time and effort into them, and to lose one over something
like that seemed a waste,” Houser says.
Having had enough, Houser, along with 60 small business people
nationwide, flew to the nation’s capital on Tuesday, June 23, to lobby
for a national public health insurance option like the one being
proposed by President Barack Obama.
Right now all of Oregon’s Democrats support Obama’s public insurance
option, with the aim of providing competition for private health
insurers to “keep them honest.”—all except Oregon Senator Ron
Wyden, who became the focus last week of a national advertising
campaign funded by Healthcare for America Now [“Why Not, Wyden?” News,
June 11].
Houser is not the only Portland small business owner anxiously
hoping for Obama’s reforms.
“I don’t think my story is such a sob story,” says hair stylist
Karen Friedman, who works as an independent contractor at a salon in
Northwest Portland. “Other people have it much worse. But it’s a
typical story.”
Friedman paid $531.66 for basic health insurance last
month—that includes prescription coverage for her
migraines—through PacifiCare. Next year, Friedman turns 50, and
will be paying $757.73 a month. When she turns 55, it will be $917.75 a
month, at the current rates.
“There’s no way I can afford this,” she says. “I’m making it, but I
don’t make all my expenses in a month. My clients, my Republican
clients, I love to tell them what I pay in health insurance. Their eyes
just bug out of their heads.”
Friedman continues to invest in health coverage, unlike most of her
fellow hair stylists. One of her coworkers, a single mother who smokes,
has had a cough for 18 months but refuses to go to the doctor because
she doesn’t have insurance, Friedman says. “I keep joking that we
should take up a collection.”
Meanwhile Amanda Lerch and Jared Wilson, who co-own The Maiden on SE
Morrison, say they feel guilty about being unable to afford health
insurance for their 10 employees at a total of $900 a month.
“One of our employees tripped and fell on the panini grill,” says
Lerch. “She burned her arm really badly, but I don’t think she went to
the doctor.
“I felt horrible about that, because obviously it’s my panini
grill,” Wilson adds.
Wilson, Lerch, Friedman, and Houser are among hundreds of small
business people in Portland identified by Main Street Alliance
organizer Richard Pressici, who is also making the trip to DC. The
question for Pressici is whether America’s top politicians are really
interested in a small business perspective on health care. “Or are they
just saying that?”
“I’ve been involved in local charity work and politics, but I never
thought about doing anything on a national level—from a local
level you don’t have much impact,” Houser explains, when asked why he’s
making the trip. “But Obama’s chosen to push this so early in his
administration and with all this political capital. I’ve never been so
hopeful that something might actually be accomplished.
“It all just seems so close, so possible,” he continues. “That I
might actually make a difference.”