Government, Courts, and the World of Work

President Obama’s health care proposal focuses on employers’ responsibility as health costs eat into their ability to hire workers, invest in and expand their businesses, and compete locally and globally.

Most employers would be involved in health care reform.  Under the Senate bill, there is no mandate for employers to provide health insurance. However, the Senate bill requires large employers (i.e., those with more than 50 workers) to make payments only if taxpayers are supporting the health insurance for their workers. The assessment on the employer is $3,000 per full-time worker obtaining tax credits in a newly created purchasing exchange if that employer’s coverage is unaffordable, or $750 per full-time worker if the employer has a worker obtaining tax credits in the exchange but doesn’t offer coverage in the first place.

The House bill requires a payroll tax for insurers that do not offer health insurance that meets minimum standards. The tax is 8% generally and phases in for employers with annual payrolls from $500,000 to $750,000; according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the assessment for a firm with average wages of $40,000 would be $3,200 per worker.

 Under the President’s Proposal, small businesses will receive $40 billion in tax credits to support coverage for their workers beginning this year. Consistent with the Senate bill, small businesses with fewer than 50 workers would be exempt from any employer responsibility policies.  

The President’s Proposal is consistent with the Senate bill in that it does not impose a mandate on employers to offer or provide health insurance, but does require them to help defray the cost if taxpayers are footing the bill for their workers.

 The President’s Proposal gives employers somewhat of a break. Employers with 50 or more workers can subtract out the first 30 workers from the payment calculation (e.g., a firm with 51 workers that does not offer coverage will pay an amount equal to 51 minus 30, or 21 times the applicable per employee payment amount). It changes the applicable payment amount for firms with more than 50 employees that do not offer coverage to $2,000 – an amount that is one-third less than the average House assessment for a typical firm and less than half of the average employer contribution to health insurance in 2009. It applies the same firm-size threshold across the board to all industries. It fully eliminates the assessment for workers in a waiting period, while maintaining the 90-day limit on the length of any waiting period beginning in 2014.

One of the suggestions contained in the Labor transition report submitted to Governor Christie is to delete the word “Labor” from the Department of Labor and Workforce Development because the “current name suggests a bias toward organized labor, and a change in the name will help the department more closely align with all stakeholders.”

The Governor wants to focus on job development and presumably the stakeholders to which the report is referring are employers.  But simply issuing an executive order changing the name of the department will not make it more employer-friendly or customer driven, if that’s the goal.

Whatever its name, the department was not legally created as a booster of trade and commerce.  Among other things, it was authorized to administer and enforce Federal and State wage, hour, health and safety laws.  And to no one’s surprise, these laws are complex and conflicting and near incomprehensible to a many employers.

So to be truly employer-friendly, the new commissioner has two choices - streamline existing regulations so that they work better and do not conflict with Federal counterparts, or engage in lax enforcement.

Lax enforcement is a default option until something really bad happens, like worker injuries that could have been prevented or docked paychecks that should never have occurred.  So while banishing the word “labor” is good symbolism, the real work is engaging in a total review of all existing  regulations and to streamline them through executive order when possible or to propose new ones when necessary.