"Cover The Uninsured Week" Bring Awareness Of Health Options For Children and Families Washington, D.C., March 25, 2009 -- The National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE) joins business owners, organizations, educators and others who are banding together to raise awareness for Cover the Uninsured Week. This week marks the seventh year of the initiative under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It focuses on demonstrating support for programs that seek to provide health insurance for the nine million children living without coverage, like the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). According to a recent online poll by the NASE, one quarter of micro-business owners are currently uninsured, and almost three-quarters (71 percent) have been uninsured at some time. Cost seems to be the main barrier to insurance for the self-employed and micro-business owners, with 29 percent of currently uninsured respondents citing "cost/affordability" as the main reason they were without health insurance. Forty-four percent indicated that the main reason they had been uninsured at some point in time was because they were unable to afford premium costs. 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. The Equity for Our Nation's Self-Employed Act (H.R. 1470), introduced earlier this month, would eliminate this double digit disparity in the tax code, which inhibits the self-employed from receiving a full deduction for health insurance costs. SCHIP was formed to assist children from low-income families in gaining access to health insurance. But even among those parents who received employer-sponsored coverage, rising health care costs mean many cannot afford their portion of the premiums. To search for Cover the Uninsured Week events by state, go to http://covertheuninsured.org/events/. For more information on making smart health care choices, visit the NASE-sponsored site, http://health.NASE.org.
About the NASE The National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE) is the nation's leading resource for the self-employed and micro-businesses, bringing a broad range of benefits to help entrepreneurs succeed and to drive the continued growth of this vital segment of the American economy. The NASE is a 501(c) (6) nonprofit organization and provides big-business advantages to hundreds of thousands of micro-businesses across the United States. For more information, visit the association's Web site at www.nase.org.
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Courtesy of NASE.org https://www.nase.org/about-us/media-relations/nase-in-the-news/2009/03/25/NASE_Highlights_Need_For_Comprehensive_Health_Reform