[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 19577-19578]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      SHOP ACT/HEALTH CARE REFORM

  (Mr. GERLACH asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mr. GERLACH. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my concern about 
the House Democrat health care reform package and its impact on small 
businesses and jobs.
  At a time when our Nation's unemployment rate is approaching 10 
percent, this legislation would impose new surtaxes on high-wage 
earners to pay for reform. The reality is that this is not a tax on the 
rich, as many would claim, but rather a tax on small business owners, 
who provide 70 percent of the jobs in the United States. And if 
enacted, these taxes could cost 4.7 million more jobs to be lost.

[[Page 19578]]

  Now is not the time to be pushing legislation that would cause even 
more Americans to lose their jobs. Instead, we need to focus our ways 
and our attention on ways to make health care more affordable for small 
business owners so that they can meet the needs of the health of their 
employees and stay in business. That is why we should allow small 
businesses to band together in statewide and nationwide pools to obtain 
lower insurance premiums and provide a tax credit for small business 
owners and the self-employed. We need to help small business owners 
with the right health care reform, not legislation that just raises 
their taxes in these tough economic times.

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