"In listening to Wisconsinites, I hear all too often about high health care costs digging into the profits of businesses and making it difficult to offer employees access to good, affordable health care," Feingold said. "By helping local businesses form cost-effective coalitions, this legislation will improve the quality of health care that businesses can afford to provide their employees."
"Whether I am talking to the owner of a struggling small business or the human resource manager of a large company, the soaring costs of health insurance is a common concern. The legislation we are introducing today will help employers cope with rising costs by encouraging them to band together to form health care purchasing cooperatives to increase their bargaining power, enabling them to negotiate both lower rates and higher quality," Collins said.
The Promoting Health Care Purchasing Cooperatives Act would authorize grants to a group of businesses so that they could form group-purchasing cooperatives to obtain enhanced benefits, reduce health care rates, and improve quality. By pooling their experience and interests, employers involved in a coalition could better attack essential problems, such as rising health insurance rates and the lack of comparable health care quality data.
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