A Word to Business Owners

• How much have your healthcare costs risen in the past three years?
• How has this affected your business?
• Does this limit your ability to invest in new technology?
• How much does the cost of healthcare contribute to your loss of market share to Asia?

Successful healthcare reform directly involves the businesses community. As the cost of insurance rises, tight profit margins force employers to limit wages, reduce investments in new technology, or decrease healthcare benefits. This reduction in healthcare coverage further fuels the present crisis.

Patients without health insurance shift their care from outpatient clinics to emergency rooms where they cannot be turned away. Here, driven by defensive medicine, less efficient care becomes considerably more expensive. As the cost of those who cannot pay is shifted to those who can, premiums soar. Escalating premiums force employers to further limit healthcare expenses and the cycle begins anew.

We must make the American healthcare system more effective and efficient. To simply spend more money on a broken system will only take father into debt. However, physicians cannot do this alone. We must have the help of the business community. Together, we can secure the future of America’s healthcare and fuel the productivity of American business.

What you can do.

1. Join our effort.
   It is essential business owners, senior executives, and human resource personnel partner with physicians. The task of healthcare reform is too massive for physicians to tackle alone. We must not only improve patient care at the bedside, but do so in a cost effective and efficient manner. By joining our movement Physicians for Reform can partner business leaders in key states and congressional districts.
   
   
2. Help carry a message of healthcare reform to the voting public. Even as physicians use non-partisan literature to help patients better understand the subject of healthcare reform, employers can place brochures in envelopes with pay-stubs. This can help educate the public on the real problems facing American healthcare and present possible solutions.
   
   
3. Support our effort
   The average business spends between $4,000 and $5,000 per employee per year on healthcare. A contribution of even $10 of $20 per employee would enable Physicians for Reform to place these reforms on the national stage. Even if these reforms reduce the cost of health insurance by a mere 5% this would reinvigorate American industry.
   
   By using non-tax-deductible donations Physicians for Reform can engage in issue advocacy. Donations made through corporations can be made with pre-tax dollars and be considered a business expense. Physicians for Reform is not a Political Action Committee and none of the money raised will be given to politicians. All donations will be used to take our message to the voting public.