WASHINGTON - (Business Wire) The National Retail Federation today asked the House to reject health care reform legislation scheduled for debate this weekend, saying a pay-or-play mandate that employers provide health insurance to their workers or pay a financial penalty would force retailers to lay off workers in order to cover the added labor costs. NRF said consideration of the legislation would be counted as a key vote in NRF’s annual ranking of lawmakers on issues important to the retail industry. “NRF adamantly opposes employer mandates of any type, whether pay-or-play, set penalty or ‘free-rider’ in nature,” NRF Senior Vice President for Government Relations Steve Pfister said in a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and House members. “Employer mandates are fundamentally inconsistent with good health care reform and it is an economic certainty that if labor costs significantly increase, retailers – who operate on razor thin profit margins – will have no choice but to reduce the size of their workforces.”
“Employer mandates of any kind amount to a direct tax on jobs and we can think of few steps that would be more dangerous to take in the middle of our present economic difficulty,” Pfister said. “Our economy needs to grow through job creation, not to have double-digit unemployment numbers further exacerbated.”
Pfister also expressed concern about a “public option” government-run insurance plan that would reimburse doctors and hospitals at less than market rates, leaving private insurance plans paid for by employers to pick up the difference, lack of serious malpractice reform, and the legislation’s proposal to limit grandfathering of existing group health plans under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to five years, which would limit employers’ flexibility during the period and greatly increase coverage costs at the end of the period.
The House is scheduled to take up H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, on Saturday. The legislation includes a pay-or-play mandate that would require employers to pay 72.5 percent of premium costs for individual coverage for both full-time and part-time workers and 60 percent for family coverage. Those who fail to do so would be required to pay a new payroll tax of 8 percent.
NRF has outlined its own plans to bring health care costs under control in the NRF Vision for Health Care Reform available at www.nrf.com/healthcare.
The National Retail Federation is the world's largest retail trade association, with membership that comprises all retail formats and channels of distribution including department, specialty, discount, catalog, Internet, independent stores, chain restaurants, drug stores and grocery stores as well as the industry's key trading partners of retail goods and services. NRF represents an industry with more than 1.6 million U.S. retail establishments, more than 24 million employees - about one in five American workers - and 2008 sales of $4.6 trillion. As the industry umbrella group, NRF also represents more than 100 state, national and international retail associations. www.nrf.com.
Read letter
National Retail Federation
J. Craig Shearman, 202-626-8134
shearmanc@nrf.com
