In the comments of my post about the Maryland Legislature overridding the Governor’s veto of their socailist healthcare plan for large businesses (read: Wal-Mart), the Heartless Libertarian mentioned that there was a bill of the same tact floating around the Washington State Legislature.
After a little searching, I found House Bill 2517 and Senate Bill 6356, both of which are titled: Establishing Minimum Labor Standards for Certain Large Employers as Related to Health Care Services Expenditures
Or, as I like to call them, the “We Hate Wal-Mart Twins”.
Both were up for public discussion last Thursday and although there are no notes or minutes of the meetings, I seriously doubt that nary a word was said about how this would drive even more businesses out of Washington.
‘The Twins’ would require any business that employs of 5000 or more employees to annually report how much of their payroll expenditures went towards employee healthcare benefits and if those costs do not equal or exceed 9% of the total payroll, the company must pay the difference to the state.
As much as I hate to see the state have to use my taxdollars to pay for healthcare that a working person isn’t getting from their job, I would much rather the state just not pay for any healthcare than to double-up on the taxes on businesses because those businesses have a bottom line to meet.
But that’ll never happen, so I’ll get another couple years of listening to the state legislature talk with head’s fully keistered, wondering why we have such a high unemployment rate compared to the rest of the country.
Believe it or not, apparently both the TNT and the P-I have editorialized against the bill.
http://www.soundpolitics.com/archives/005607.html#005607
I also read somewhere that the primary author, whose name escapes me, has announced the intention, once the bill has been passed, to ratchet the threshold # of employees downward in stages. Eventually if you employ people, you’ll get hit.
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