May 25, 2010
I’m back — thanks for all the nice wishes.From my occasional glimpses at the newspapers the last week and a half I see that I have a lot of work to do.
I’ll start with a cheap shot. The NYT just noticed that the pay or play provision in the health care bill makes no sense. The issue here is the extent to which larger employers will be obligated to pick up a portion of their workers’ health care costs. The final bill included a provision that subjected employers of more than 50 workers to penalties if employees’ health care costs exceeded a certain percent of family income.
The problem with this sort of penalty structure is that employers do not have control over workers family income and in general should not even know it. This sets up an absurd penalty structure where employers do not have the knowledge they need to act to avoid the penalty — it’s sort of like enforcing speed limits that randomly change and are never posted.
The problem with the NYT coverage is its description of this problem as: “a little-noticed provision of the law.” Yes, it is true the provision got relatively little attention, but the NYT played a big role in this. Had the NYT opted to pick up on a problem that some people were trying to call attention to, notably Robert Reichsauer, the President of the Urban Insititute and also the former director of CBO (also CEPR), then maybe this ill-conceived penalty never would have made it into the final law.
Comments