mr. speaker , i yield myself the balance of my time . 
mr. speaker , small employers today have a difficult problem . 
they are trying to keep their business alive . 
they are trying to make enough money to hire and grow their business and at the same time trying to provide affordable health insurance . 
about 60 percent of the 45 million people who have no health insurance work for small businesses of some sort . 
but what happens to those small employers in most of these state risk pools ? 
they are in the small group coverage area , and guess what happens ? 
there may be a provider or two that will offer them insurance . 
they are stuck in a small pool , and they pay the highest rates of any group that is out there , unless , unless , one happens to be self-employed . 
let us say that they were a realtor , and as a realtor they are self-employed , they are not an employee of a company , and they try to buy health insurance for themselves out in the open market again in these small state risk pools . 
here it comes , $ 1 , 500 a month , $ 2 , 000 a month . 
and , my goodness , if they are sick , they will not get it at all . 
so what we have been proposing now for some 10 years , and the house has passed this on a bipartisan basis at least five times , is to allow businesses and self-employed individuals who belong to bona fide organizations to group together for the purposes of health insurance . 
why should a realtor who belongs to the national association of realtors not have an opportunity , whether their state association or the national association wants to put together a package of plans and allow them to choose one of those plans that might fit the kind of coverage that they want , why would we not want to do this ? 
we have heard all this shtick about all these plans are lousy , they are low-cost coverage . 
no . 
these plans would look exactly like the plans that big companies and unions offer today . 
everybody in america wants to work for a big company or a union . 
why ? 
because they have got great health benefits . 
and why do they have great health benefits ? 
because that is what their employees and that is that their members want . 
people do not want to go out and buy low-cost coverage that does not cover anything . 
that does not accomplish anything . 
so when we look at the opportunity for small businesses to go out and to be able to purchase health insurance for their employees , just like a big company or just like a union under the same set of rules , the same set of rules for small companies that big companies have today , we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good . 
this will not solve the problem of all 45 million of the uninsured , but it will help millions of americans who work for small businesses have a better opportunity at getting good health coverage at competitive prices . 
we have heard an awful lot of talk about it does not have this mandate , that mandate , that mandate . 
and why do big companies who do not have to have any mandated coverages under erisa , why do they provide those ? 
why do they have breast cancer screening ? 
why ? 
because it makes sense to screen for this to detect it early and to deal with it . 
why do they have these benefits that are not mandated ? 
why ? 
because they make sense to find out early in the illness . 
these small companies are going to have the same types of high-quality plans that big companies have today without state mandates , because what happens is every state has a mandate . 
some of them have as many as 30 mandated benefits that drive up the cost of health insurance and drive the number of uninsured up as well . 
but companies that offer a lot of these benefits , they do so with , as an example , a breast cancer benefit that covers the whole country , one size , not 50 different states done in 50 different ways that they have to find out exactly how it is going to be covered in each of those 50 states . 
i have no doubt that the policies that will be offered by these association health plans will , in fact , be high-quality policies at very competitive prices . 
as i said before , this bill has passed the house on a number of occasions with broad bipartisan support , and i expect that will occur again today . 
so i would ask my colleagues to stand up and vote . 
we hope that the other body will eventually take this bill up and move it and to help reduce the number of uninsured americans that we have . 
