House Small Biz Committee: If you don’t like the testimony, ignore it?

Small business owners testified for and against Obamacare, but the committee’s official summary mentions only one side

The small business owners who testified on Obamacare at the March 22 hearing of the House Small Business Committee had very different views. One said the health care law was bad, and the other said he was a big fan of it.

But if you read the committee’s official news release summarizing the hearing, which was prepared by Chairman Steve Chabot, R-OH, you would have gotten only one side of the story.

The summary mentions only the witness who spoke against Obamacare.

It then offers Chabot’s statement that nearly all small businesses are basically opposed to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

“Small business witness after small business witness has come before us (and constituent after constituent back home) and stated how unworkable the whole thing is,” Chabot stated in the summary.

Chabot was in charge of the March 22 hearing. But in the summary of the event he apparently ignored testimony from one of the key witnesses, David Borris, owner of Hell’s Kitchen Catering in Northbrook IL and a board member of the Main Street Alliance national organization of small business owners.

Borris testified on the Affordable Care Act.

“Since the passage of the ACA, our average annual increases are a fraction of what they were before, averaging 4.6% for the seven years from 2010 to 2017. I am saving money on premiums, and I am plowing those savings back into business investment and job creation,” Borris said at the hearing.

Another small business witness at the hearing, Skip Paal, owner of a floral business in Baltimore, MD, who also was representing a florists’ group, testified that the ACA was “detrimental” to his business.

GOP leaders and President Trump made an attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare last week, without success. GOP leaders and Chabot have been persistent critics of Obamacare.

While Congress is led by GOP leaders, congressional hearings are supposed to be information-gathering events. The public expects the committees and chairmen holding hearings to provide fair and accurate representations of what happened at the hearings.

That means that if witnesses at a hearing had strongly opposing views on a topic, the committee summary should indicate the diversity of views. That did not happen here.

Chabot did not respond to a request for comment.

More Information:
Committee hearing: http://goo.gl/sEKRy0
Committee summary: http://goo.gl/wIKEF2

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