Nonprofits feel excluded from health care reform debate

ShareThis

ABILENE, Texas - Nonprofit organizations -- from food banks and the arts community to churches and hospice centers -- have largely been left out of the debate over health care reform, advocates say.

That is the conclusion of Tim Delaney, president and chief executive officer of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations.

"When Congress got together, they passed three different bills on the House side," said Delaney, in recent remarks at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene. "All three take care of small businesses; not one takes care of nonprofits."

On the Senate side, "there was one bill that passed that takes care of nonprofits," he said, while another gives nonprofits a 35 percent tax credit, compared to 50 percent for small businesses.

From where Delaney sits, that's "substandard" treatment, even though nonprofits employ more than 10 percent of the American workforce -- more than the real estate or finance industry.

Others watching the debate also see problems.

A recent report by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies called the impact on nonprofits of rising health care costs "mammoth" with "profound implications for the country's current health reform debate."

According to the report, this problem is hardly mentioned in the debate. "These implications are being ignored in important part because of a lack of timely data on the special health benefit challenges this important set of workers, and the organizations that employ them, are facing," the report stated.

Getting that message heard is difficult, especially in the face of realities such as an insurance-health care industry that spends an estimated $2 million a day on its own lobbying efforts, Delaney said.

All this comes at a time when the economy has kicked nonprofits "in the teeth," with corporate donations, individual giving and other traditional funding sources falling off as a result., he said. "Nonprofits are being hurt badly."

As a consequence, more than a third of nonprofits have cut staff and programs in the last eight months.

Gains on Wall Street don't mean much for nonprofits, he said, with state tax revenues falling.

"For the first six months of this year, they have declined at a greater rate than they have in the last 54 years," he said, meaning many state and local governments cannot pay nonprofits money that is owed.

"They're laying people off, which means while our government sources are down, demand for our services are up," he said. "So we're caught in this wicked cycle."

(Brian Bethel is a reporter for The Abilene Reporter-News in Texas.)