Uneasy on 'free rider'

It's said a camel is a horse designed by committee. If so, the "free rider" insurance provision in the Senate's Finance Committee health care reform bill is a definite dromedary.

The free riders, in this case, are employers who would allow the government to pay for their employees' health insurance, if their employees are eligible. Meanwhile, the employer would pay a penalty to the government roughly equal to the cost of that insurance.

Easy. One either plays or pays. That's the horse.

Yet the "free rider" language in the current bill divides businesses into groups of 50 employees or fewer, with different criteria for calculating penalties. The criteria is based on employee income against federal poverty levels, or the percentage of employee income that private insurance would cost them.

Wait, there's more.

What an employer provides for insurance also factors in, to guard against a business offering the barest coverage in return for avoiding a penalty. Depending on what an individual business does, offers, or pays, a penalty — if necessary — is determined.

Huh? This is the camel.

Nothing against camels — they have their purposes — but what reform requires are horses. This free rider provision ignores the simple solution for the complex, while continuing government's legacy of regulating insurance beyond basic comprehension.

Few like it. Free rider is seen as discriminatory against lower-income people and families, since employer penalties are triggered if an employee qualifies for public insurance. A single parent, for example, could be passed over for a job because of the greater penalty for their care.

(Why the government would penalize a business for hiring is beyond us.)

Free rider is also viewed, rightly, as an unwieldy regulation that creates an administrative burden for business and government; that is, calculating the individual penalties and subsidies for perhaps thousands of employers and their employees.

Since free rider targets businesses with large numbers of lower-income employees, perhaps the least stable and itinerant worker population, the unenviable task of tracking subsidies, levying penalties and processing payments should not be underestimated.

It would be a sad irony if any savings from free rider were consumed by the bureaucracy needed to run it.

Reforming health care is not simple, but the principles that should guide it are easy. Overly complex solutions, however, can weaken the reforms. Does health care need to be any more difficult?

No.

Sen. Olympia Snowe supports free rider; she should reconsider it. Her support of small businesses in health care debate is laudable. But under free rider, these small firms could suffer from its added administrative burden, or the unpredictability of its costs.

Free rider is a camel, created by committee to satisfy myriad interests. Yet it is inferior to the elegant and functional solution standing right there hitched to the proverbial post.

A simple play-or-pay system is the right way to go.

editorialboard@sunjournal.com