Cambia Health Solutions is promoting a bill that will allow any small business in Oregon to buy small-group health insurance, regardless of where the employees live.
“There are a number of companies that have employees scattered all over because of the Internet,” said Tom Holt, the lobbyist for Cambia, parent company of Regence BlueCross BlueShield.
Senate Bill 146 is a simple bill that removes a curious barrier to small Oregon employers who want to offer health insurance to their employees -- a requirement that most of their employees live here, and not, say across the river in Vancouver.
“This bill says as long as you’re based in Oregon, that’s good enough,” Holt said, noting that removing this barrier is especially important as the small-group market, which reduces risk for small employers through community rating, expands from employers with 50 workers to those with 100 employees next year.
Holt’s colleague John C. Powell researched the issue but found no rationale why then-Sen. John Kitzhaber put the out-of-state restriction in place when he drafted the bill that created the modern insurance market for small businesses in the early ‘90s. The Insurance Division was unable to provide a rationale for the restriction by press time.
“Since this law was passed in the 1990s, there has been this thing called the Internet,” Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend, quipped in his support of SB 146 on the Senate floor. “And many firms are now virtual and have remote workers in the U.S. and global marketplace.”
The bill has no organized opposition and just one legislator, Sen. Alan Olsen, R-Canby, opposed SB 146 when it passed the Senate in March. In addition to Regence, the Oregon Association of Health Underwriters -- the trade group for insurance agents -- supports the bill.
