I was sent this email on Christmas Eve right after the Senate met for a vote on the health care bill.\u00a0 It was a mass email to several people in the construction industry.<\/p>\n
I said yesterday’s Alert was probably the final version for 2009 – but I had to bring the attached to your attention.\u00a0 Senator Jeff Merkley (D. Or.) introduced a last minute amendment to the Senate Health Care Bill that requires<\/em> small employers (with 5 or more employees) in the construction industry (and only<\/em> 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.<\/em><\/p>\n
The Senate passed their Bill this morning in a rare Christmas eve session, by a\u00a0purely partisan 60 to 39 vote.\u00a0 The Senate Bill must now be reconciled with the House version, and the two differ dramatically in several critical areas.\u00a0 Do not stop pressuring your Senator and Representative to vote NO on any bill (conference report) that returns from the conference committee.<\/em><\/p>\n
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.\u00a0 We will think of something . . . we always do.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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:<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019 health insurance.<\/em><\/p>\n
While this framework will work for most industries, it simply doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n