Repealing ERISA—II

Repealing Erisa—II. WSJ Editorial
The House bill would harm businesses’ ability to offer insurance.
The Wall Street Journal, p A16, Jul 31, 2009

The worst thing that can be said about the House health bill is what’s in it. Presumably that explains why Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office zapped as “false and misleading” one of our recent editorials—on the 1974 federal law known as Erisa that lets large businesses offer insurance with minimal government interference. Among the rebuttals is the “fact” that Democrats will give “all American families more choices of quality, affordable health care.”

Then again, 151 businesses and industry groups that depend on Erisa agree that the House bill will result in fewer insurance choices for employees, not more, once all benefits are exposed to political tampering. In a letter to Mrs. Pelosi this week, the coalition—including everyone from American Airlines to Xerox—says the bill includes “numerous provisions that increase the requirements and burdens on employer-sponsored coverage and limit employer flexibility to meet the needs of their workforce by requiring them to meet federal one-size-fits-all standards after a five-year ‘grace period.’”

That’s what we said. Ms. Pelosi and allies like Henry Waxman don’t dispute that new Erisa standards are built into the bill but say most employers won’t have any trouble meeting them. “The House bill actually protects and increases employer-sponsored insurance,” reads another fact-check item. But why regulate what they admit is already working?

The reality is that once Erisa is broken the whole universe of business benefits will be distorted by Congress’s gravitational pull. For instance, some employers are trying to save on insurance costs by giving workers financial incentives to lose weight or exercise more. Pressure groups such as AARP and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees are demanding that Democrats prohibit this practice as discriminatory. “If you give one person a discount, someone else is going to end up paying more,” an AARP lobbyist told Kaiser Health News. Well, yes. That’s the point.

The employer-sponsored system has its problems, but one of them is not a lack of Congressional supervision. The House Erisa provisions are definitive proof that ObamaCare would in fact erode "the health care you have."