Finally. The so-called “Wal-Mart bill” is dead. Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler said earlier this week he would not appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court a federal appeals court ruling finding the legislation violated federal law.
Legislators must take the cue from Gansler and not try to resurrect the bill in their next session.
Why is this so important? The legislation, billed by proponents as the first step to providing health care for all, offered no relief for the majority of the estimated 800,000 people without health care in the state.
Technically called the Fair Share Health Care Act, the bill would have forced companies with 10,000 or more employees to provide health care for their workers. Since Wal-Mart was the only one meeting that criteria, the bill really was a carefully-tailored slap to the giant retailer by its union-backed supporters who wanted to bend the company to their will.
As a side note, Wal-Mart pays its workers an average of $10 an hour here ? higher than the “living wage” for workers in rural counties recently passed by the state legislature.
Besides not being very “fair,” the debate over the bill wasted precious time and resources that could have been devoted to considering structural reforms to the state?s healthcare system. The same short-sighted thinking guided legislators in their debates in this year?s session over raising the cigarette tax to finance expanding Medicaid. If anything, the bill would only have provided an incrementally shrinking Band-Aid for the state?s medical expenses, estimated to consume 20 percent of the budget by 2011, upfrom 15 percent in 2006, according to the Maryland Public Policy Institute.
Many proposals to fix the health care system float around the country. The only ones worth considering break the knot tying health insurance to employment. Many people switch careers five or six times, often losing insurance in between jobs. Those people comprise a big portion of the uninsured.
But the bigger issue is finding ways to help people who work for small businesses, the biggest employers in the state, afford health insurance. Too many are dropping coverage ? about 40 percent of small businesses provide health care, down 13 percent since 1999 and the numbers are only expected to go down. Since only 3,300 of the 158,000 businesses in Maryland have more than 100 employees, this is no small problem.
A big part of the issue is that current plans can only spread risk among employees. Another problem is that Maryland law requires all plans to include 26 types of coverage that many people would not choose if deciding on their own.
All this evidence points to the fact that any bill worth debating must spread risk across the entire state and make plans flexible and portable.
Massachusetts and California recently attempted to tackle the problem. Maryland must be the next. 800,000 people are waiting.
