As the state’s 2006 legislative session winds down, it appears Senate lawmakers won’t vote on a proposed bill that would require large companies to provide comprehensive health care benefits to their workers.

Modeled after a law in Maryland known as the “Wal-Mart bill,” New York’s version would tax companies with at least 100 employees if they failed to spend at least $3 an hour on health insurance per worker.

While the bill remains stalled in the Legislature’s upper house, it would be premature for opponents of the measure to celebrate just yet – especially considering that politics weigh heavy on this legislation and the Senate is heading toward a crucial election year.

The bill, formally known as the Fair Share for Health Care Act, is sponsored by Republican Sen. Nick Spano of Yonkers, who won his last election in 2004 by just 18 votes. And Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, desperate to hold onto Republican control of the Senate, has shown a recent willingness to go forward with Spano-sponsored bills that, in the past, the GOP wouldn’t have even entertained.

Consider, for instance, a union-backed bill championed recently by Spano that would have made 52,000 home-based day care providers state employees. The legislation passed the Republican-dominated Senate 61-0, despite Gov. George Pataki’s insistence on freezing the size of the state workforce.

Fortunately, Pataki vetoed the bill.

It should be noted, too, that while the legislative session officially ends Thursday, that doesn’t prohibit lawmakers from reconvening before November’s election. And despite the official end of the legislative calendar, Spano’s Wal-Mart bill remains alive.

As for the bill itself, it would increase costs on companies already struggling to do business in a state where taxes and energy costs are exceedingly high. Even the state’s Working Families Party, which supports the proposed legislation, has acknowledged it would cost businesses an additional $4 billion.

The bill also completely ignores the real obstacles that exist in New York when it comes to providing affordable health coverage.

The state’s uninsured number is actually shrinking and is at the lowest level in a decade. Though that decline is primarily because of expanded public health programs such as Family Health Plus and Healthy New York, driving that expansion is the limited choice of affordable health care in the state’s over-regulated individual insurance market.

While large companies in New York have health premium costs slightly below the national average, small businesses in the state pay the second highest average premium in the nation.

The discrepancy can be blamed, in part, on New York’s community rating, which prohibits premiums based on factors such as age, tobacco use and gender. Sharing the blame as well are the state’s numerous service mandates and onerous regulations that not only drive up small business costs, but also keep insurers from entering the market. States with more flexible insurance rate regulations have lower premiums and more insurers licensed to sell to small businesses. For example, Indiana, despite having only a third of New York’s population, has 77 insurers serving the market there compared to only 29 in the Empire State.

That said, the cost associated with New York’s own proposed Wal-Mart bill is impossible to ignore.

Sponsored also by Manhattan Democratic Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, the legislation would cost a typical New York business with 200 full-time employees $400,000 more a year. That’s $2,000 more per employee.

Statewide, it’s been estimated that New York’s Wal-Mart bill would cost businesses as much as $9.2 billion and result in the loss of up to 100,000 jobs, according to University of Kentucky economist Aaron Yelowitz in research sponsored by the Employment Policies Institute. And while the bill would provide coverage to 466,000 uninsured workers, that’s less than one third of all uninsured workers in the state, Yelowitz notes.

It would be easy, of course, for cynics to claim the legislation is meant to simply appease the state’s politically powerful labor unions that back the bill.
But if politics is not the motivation, the sponsors must be asked: If this bill is truly what’s best for New York’s workers, why does it exempt the state’s agriculture and manufacturing industries?

When it comes to further reducing New York’s uninsured ranks, imposing another costly mandate on business is not the answer. Instead, lawmakers must focus on opening New York’s limited insurance market and making health coverage more affordable.

Easing excessive regulations and eliminating costly and burdensome mandates is a good place to start.