Lawmakers want businesses to help pay for state health plan

Two state representatives � a Democrat and a Republican � are promoting a plan that asks Wisconsin businesses to help pay for a statewide health insurance purchasing pool but also promises to yield savings that would ease the burden on employers struggling to pay health-care costs.

Reps. Curt Gielow, R-Mequon, and Jon Richards, D-Milwaukee, say the idea � which calls for an 8 percent to 12 percent payroll tax to pay for the cost of covering workers � would save Wisconsin employers money because they now spend an average of 15 percent of payroll on employee health insurance premiums.

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"In most cases, the average Wisconsin company's going to be paying a lot less than what they're currently paying with the added benefit of taking that off your plate so you can concentrate on running your business instead of managing health care," Richards said.

The program would be run by a private corporation governed by a board made up of representatives from business and labor groups. The plan would cover about 80 percent of Wisconsin residents; people over 65 could continue to get coverage through Medicare.

The proposal also incorporates what proponents describe as "consumer-driven" incentives, including giving state residents a credit they could use to buy health insurance from competing plans.

The plan also pairs an annual deductible of $1,200 with a health savings account containing $600 a year that consumers could use to help pay for a range of medical care including covering part of the deductible. Unused money could be carried over from year to year.

"The core principle behind our plan is to unleash the market forces that will naturally drive down costs of health care," Richards said.

But Steve Sobiek, executive director for Independent Business Association of Wisconsin, said he does not believe the proposal does anything to address rising health care costs in the long term.

"It basically, I think, is going to hurt our business climate by imposing another burden, another tax on the business community that will make us even more uncompetitive," he said. "It's a cosmetic fix."

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state's largest business group, has not taken a position on the plan. Spokesman Jim Pugh said that, in general, the group supports market-driven reforms aimed at increasing competition to keep costs down.

"An 8 to 12 percent tax increase on businesses needs to be viewed extremely cautiously," Pugh said. "We don't want to discourage people from thinking creatively to try to deal with issues that affect businesses in Wisconsin."

Gielow stressed that the plan would allow for giving back the $500 million it's projected to free up in the state's two-year budget, whether it's through repealing the corporate income tax or personal property tax, or providing sales tax relief.

"I think if you're going to do a payroll assessment, we need a quid pro quo," he said. "I don't want government to grow here. I don't want the money to stay in the budget."

Gielow, who is chairman of the Assembly's Medicaid Reform Committee, said business and labor leaders should "noodle" on the idea for a year and come up with ways to improve it.

"I have no pride of authorship in the idea," he said. "The idea was to simply stimulate them to think about it and frankly people get stimulated when they get mad and maybe that's not a bad idea."

The proposal would eliminate BadgerCare, the state's health insurance program for the working poor, by absorbing those recipients into the new health insurance pool, where their coverage would be paid for with revenue from the payroll tax.

Some state lawmakers have been looking for ways to reform BadgerCare since the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in May that the program spends millions each year to pay medical bills for employees of some of the state's major employers, including Wal-Mart.

A survey released last year by the National Federation of Independent Businesses found that just over one-third of Wisconsin small-business owners did not offer health insurance to their employees. And of the smaller employers who were not offering health insurance, about 10 percent of them had offered insurance within the last five years.

"It's the small companies that are really getting hit hard by health care costs," Richards said. "All it takes is one employee to have a bad accident or a bad illness and your health-care rating is shot as a small employer."