EDITORIAL – Mass. bill unfair, nonsensical

Don’t look now, but there’s actually a Republican in Massachusetts. It gets better: He wants… Don’t look now, but there’s actually a Republican in Massachusetts. It gets better: He wants everyone in the state to have health care.

No, it’s not the twilight zone (though people often mistake the Northeast for that), it’s Gov. Mitt Romney, who signed a big, fat career-making bill into law on Wednesday. The new law calls for all citizens of Massachusetts to have some form of health-care insurance, a measure designed to ensure coverage for more than a half-million Massachusetts residents.

There have been a few snags, however. Romney, who coincidentally is gearing up for a potential run at the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, used his line-item veto liberally (not that kind of “liberal”) in the passage of the legislation, striking from it a provision that would require businesses with more than 11 employees to pay a $295-per-employee tax penalty if they did not provide some sort of health care for their workers.

The heavily Democratic Massachusetts house and senate that initially passed the bill are a little bit cheesed over this, citing the fact that not only would the tax provide incentive for employers to provide health care to their workers, but it would also help generate revenue to support a plan estimated to cost the state around $316 million a year.

Democrats in the state were further upset at Romney’s apparent unwillingness to enter into a more open dialogue about his modifications, signaling the end of a bipartisan group hug that Republicans were quick to credit for the birth of the bill in the first place.

Romney answered his critics by saying that the tax was “unnecessary and probably counterproductive” and wouldn’t apply to many businesses or raise much money. The revenue anticipated from the tax was estimated at around $46 million a year, or one-sixth of its total cost. Feel free to judge the usefulness of that for yourself.

While it’s understandable that Romney might not want to sign his name to something that might result in corporations thinking twice before setting up shop in his state because of the potentially higher cost of doing business, taking any kind of realistic look at this bill inevitably leads to an unappealing conclusion: In its current form, it ultimately asks that every citizen have coverage and then provides no motivation to businesses to provide any of that coverage. This is despite the fact that that’s where most adults’ health care comes from and that corporate entities pay less per capita to cover their employees than those employees would pay to cover themselves,

Under the new law, individuals who can afford health care for themselves but do not buy any will be penalized by higher taxes. Why on earth should this not apply to businesses? It’s not fair and it doesn’t make any sense.

This smacks of an effort on Romney’s part to take credit for the passage of a bill that he may have only neutered to protect his own interests. This law will likely be a model for a growing national effort to provide health care in a fair manner to all Americans. It’s bad enough that corporate America regularly gets away with not contributing its share (ahem, taxes) to the welfare of our nation’s citizens; let’s not set a precedent saying that they also don’t need to contribute to the growing push to provide health care for all Americans.