I said yesterday’s Alert was probably the final version for 2009 – but I had to bring the attached to your attention.  Senator Jeff Merkley (D. Or.) introduced a last minute amendment to the Senate Health Care Bill that requires small employers (with 5 or more employees) in the construction industry (and only the construction industry) to provide health insurance to their workforce. This is a blatant pay back to Democratic supporters in the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL CIO.

The Senate passed their Bill this morning in a rare Christmas eve session, by a purely partisan 60 to 39 vote.  The Senate Bill must now be reconciled with the House version, and the two differ dramatically in several critical areas.  Do not stop pressuring your Senator and Representative to vote NO on any bill (conference report) that returns from the conference committee.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.  We will think of something . . . we always do.

My first reaction was that I don’t see anything wrong with employers being forced to provide health insurance, since there are many firms out there taking advantage of employees by not providing these benefits.  Of course their rational is that if they didn’t want to work there they would quit and go find a job that did provide health benefits.  However, I decided to find out the reasoning behind the amendment so I found an article online by Jeff Merkley and he gave this explanation:

Right now, businesses are hamstrung by insurance costs. Health care is a huge burden for small businesses and makes our larger businesses less competitive abroad. The Senate bill addresses this by making health care more affordable. In addition, it levels the unfair playing field between firms that provide health benefits and those that don’t by requiring all employers with 50 or more employees to either provide coverage to their employees or defray the cost to taxpayers of subsidizing their employees’ health insurance.

While this framework will work for most industries, it simply doesn’t work for the construction industry, where 90 percent of firms employ fewer than 20 workers, and those contractors providing health care bid for jobs against firms that don’t day in and day out. To level the playing field in construction, therefore, I authored an amendment that would lower the threshold for construction firms to those with more than five employees and payrolls of more than $250,000 (about half of the industry’s employers). This amendment ensures that when bids are opened, a job is won or lost based upon the ability of the contractor to build with quality and innovation, not on whether they provide health insurance to their workers or not.

It is very true that the construction industry is peculiar in that the overwhelming majority of companies have very few employees, but I don’t quite agree that they have an unfair advantage over larger firms giving health insurance to all employees. After reading a bunch about how insurances work abroud on sites like http://renewehiconlineuk.com/, my views have begun to shift a little. I think it is good that politicians are making note of the construction industry idiosyncrasies, but I’m just not sure that this one makes sense.  We also have to remember that larger construction companies will also most likely have more money and greater bonding capacity which completely excludes smaller firms.  Plus, small firm probably won’t always be small, so if this non-regulation of health benefits gives any kind of advantage it would only last as long as the company remains small.

Nevertheless, I don’t think the amendment is going to make that much of a difference, we’re making a mountain out of a molehill.  Was it a payback to the unions for something or other?  Probably, but it may also force some companies to treat employee a little more appropriately.