Colorado Amendment 56: bad idea
July 30th, 2008 | by Brian Schwartz |From Monday’s Denver Post:
the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 plans to submit its signatures for a pair of initiatives Wednesday. The UFCW measures would mandate companies with 20 or more employees to provide health-care coverage… [Amendment 56]
To get a clear picture of how this mandate would play out, consider what would you do if, in addition to paying your barber or hair-stylist, the law compelled you to buy him or her, say, a basket of fruit. Would you be willing to pay the same amount for a haircut, given that you had to bring a basket of fruit with you, too? Neither would pretty much anyone else, and barbers and stylists would have to lower their rates.
The same occurs when employers pay for some of your health insurance premiums. They pay you less.
A previous post summarizes other ways employers respond to being forced to provide insurance: decreasing pay-raises, raising prices, reducing health benefits, reducing other benefits (e.g., pensions), laying people off, replacing employee with automated machines, hiring fewer people or ineligible workers, and out-sourcing.
