HELENA — Two of Montana’s main business lobbies are taking aim at health care reform before Congress, saying it could drive up costs for businesses by increasing taxes or insurance costs.

In the past two weeks, the Montana Chamber of Commerce and the state chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business have sent messages to their members, warning about certain elements of the bills.

“This bill will raise taxes on small businesses, create massive new government programs and do little to address out-of-control medical costs,” NFIB state director Riley Johnson said in a statement earlier this month, referring to the reform bill that passed the U.S. House.

Each group listed at least a dozen criticisms of the complex bills, such as the inclusion of a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers.

The government insurance plan “will likely underpay (health care) providers, exacerbating the cost shift to private (insurance) coverage,” said the Montana Chamber of Commerce in its Nov. 12 message to members.

Yet each group also leveled critiques against portions of the bill that probably won’t affect many Montana businesses at all — particularly small businesses.

For example, both groups rapped the U.S. House bill for its mandate that businesses buy health coverage for employees and pay a certain share of the cost.

The chamber, however, didn’t mention that businesses with annual payroll under $500,000 are exempt from the mandate.

The NFIB release did mention the exemption, yet didn’t say how many Montana businesses might fall under it. Johnson acknowledged Thursday that this exemption could cover many of Montana’s NFIB members, whose average employment is three to five people, with gross sales of $350,000 a year.

Johnson said the Nov. 4 release from NFIB was a “national position,” and that the organization can’t filter out how each state might be affected differently.

“You have to figure that small businesses should probably be sticking together,” he said. “They look for guidance from an organization like NFIB. We can’t segregate it out to see how it affects each state.”

Webb Brown, president of the Montana Chamber of Commerce, said its Nov. 12 note to members about the health reform bills is one of many communications it has sent on the subject. However, the list of “12 reasons why employers should care about health care reform” has generated a lot of attention, he said.

The overall message is that the reform bills may impose more costs on business, particularly by raising the cost of health insurance, he said.

If the reforms prohibit health insurers from denying or pricing coverage based on a person’s health condition, and don’t strongly require all citizens to have insurance, the cost of that insurance is bound to increase greatly, as less-healthy people will be the most likely to buy it, Brown said.

The chamber is very concerned about the cost of its own health insurance plan, Montana Chamber Choices, which sells coverage to 1,500 businesses and covers 16,000 people, he said.

Brown and Johnson also said business owners are concerned that none of the bills do much to control health care costs.

“The reason all of this (increased insurance costs) happens is because of the cost of health care,” he said. “If we don’t control the costs, we’re never going to have cheap insurance.”

When asked what health reforms the chamber might support, Brown said it wants to see more steps toward preventive care, expansion of medical information technology, more use of primary care doctors, and reforms of the medical liability system.

Johnson said NFIB members would like to be able to form insurance pools across state lines — a provision that may be in the Senate bill and is part of minority Republican health reform proposals.