Hasta La Ideas

When you think about big civic moves like the recently passed healthcare reform bill, it’s usually in wide, all-encompassing pictures and not industry-specific. By way of Archinect, we found this interesting piece at The Architect’s Newspaper, interviewing the AIA Trust‘s Executive Director, Ann Casso, and the architecture organization’s top lobbyist, Andrew Goldberg, about how the new healthcare reforms will affect architecture firms. While there aren’t specifics within the bill that focus on architecture directly, it’s interesting to read their interpretation on how they see the changes affecting their members and the industry as a whole. Based on their answers, the AIA seems sort of half and half on the bill, which explains why they didn’t take a specific side before it passed (or really after, for that matter). Here’s a bit about that:

The AIA has long supported the concept of making insurance more affordable for architecture firms, especially smaller firms, which often have struggled with rising premiums. But AIA members differ on how to achieve that — we’ve heard from members who run the gamut of viewpoints, from those who support a nationalized single-payer system to those who prefer a market-based approach.

For that reason, we did not take a position on the health care bill. We did, however, work to eliminate provisions that would be burdensome on and unfair to our industry, in particular an amendment that was added to the Senate bill at the last minute last December that would have forced construction firms with as few as 5 employees to provide insurance. The bill that Congress passed today eliminates that provision.

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