August 16, 2004

The California Chamber of Commerce seems determined to uphold several honored
principles in trying to overturn the new state law requiring more employers to
offer health insurance.

Among the principles exemplified thus far in its $4.5-million campaign to
defeat November's Proposition 72, a referendum to uphold the law, are these:
"Politics makes strange bedfellows" and "Money talks."

The ballot initiative involves SB 2, which was signed last year by Gov. Gray
Davis. It would require businesses with 200 or more employees to provide health
coverage for workers and their dependents and pay at least 80% of the premiums.
Firms with 50 to 199 workers would have to cover only the employees, a mandate
those with 20 to 49 workers would face only if the state enacted a tax credit
against their costs. Firms smaller than that would be exempt. Businesses that
chose not to buy the coverage themselves would have to pay into a state pool
that would buy it for them.

To fight this measure, the chamber has evidently abandoned all scruples about
whom it will snuggle with. As this column reported earlier, it listed a Los
Angeles "human rights" organization among its campaign partners without
disclosing that the group was in reality an affiliate of the Church of
Scientology.

One wonders if such sleight of hand is now at work in the chamber's proposed
"no on 72" statement for the state's official voter information guide. Included
is a quotation from Thomas LaGrelius, M.D., a South Bay doctor identified as
president of the "California Chapter, Association of American Physicians and
Surgeons," who says Proposition 72 "will mandate the worst kind of managed care
we have. This means we will have more and more patients with terrible
insurance."

The chamber presents this as though it were a mainstream viewpoint in the
medical profession. The very name of LaGrelius' group might even give voters
the impression that it's a big-deal professional fraternity like, say, the
American Medical Assn.

In fact, it's a Tucson-based libertarian group devoted to the privatization of
medicine, and specifically to the end of government health programs such as
Medicare and Medicaid, which serve the elderly and the indigent, respectively.
It believes Medicare is a step on the path to socialized medicine and counsels
its members to refuse participation. The effect of the Medicaid law, it says on
its website, is "evil," and "participation in carrying out its provisions is,
in our opinion, immoral." The organization claims 4,000 members nationwide,
including a California chapter that LaGrelius says is largely inactive.

I don't mean to question LaGrelius' medical bona fides or point of view, or to
suggest that the AAPS conceals its goals. LaGrelius believes Medicaid and HMOs
impose unethical constraints on a doctor's judgment, and that patients are
better off paying for routine care with cash out of their own pockets or from a
tax-advantaged health savings account. When we spoke this week, we didn't delve
deeply into the political or procedural complexities of establishing such a
system, or of providing care for people whose ready cash might not be
sufficient to pay their bills.

But when I asked Allan Zaremberg, president of the Chamber of Commerce and
co-chair of the campaign against SB 2, if his group was comfortable with the
view of Medicare as an "evil" program, he demurred.

"We didn't make those arguments," he told me. "We don't represent his platform.
We're not raising those issues with the public."

And yet the chamber raises other issues in a highly misleading way. It
continues to portray SB 2 as a threat to almost all businesses in the state,
although by its own estimate more than 99% of the state's big companies and 94%
of mid-size firms already provide workers with health coverage.

Contributions to the chamber's campaign are still skewed heavily toward
fast-food joints and department stores. The Golden Arches dominate the roll of
donors as surely as they dominate neighborhood street corners: Of the 951
contributions listed as of Aug. 2, I counted more than 500 from McDonald's
franchisees. McDonald's Corp. itself kicked in about $150,000, and the
California Restaurant Assn. $1.2 million more.

Although there's nothing wrong with these businesses protecting their
interests, the lineup undermines Zaremberg's assertion that the chamber has
assembled "a very broad and diverse coalition of opponents" to Proposition 72.

In truth, the large and mid-size employers that offer health coverage now would
love for skinflint competitors to be prevented from freeloading on the public
health system by denying their workers insurance. For one thing, the practice
drives up premiums and taxes for those acting responsibly.

The chamber contends that one of its reasons for fighting the new law is a
desire to protect workers from a healthcare "tax," but that's equally
laughable. After failing to utter a peep this year when three big supermarket
chains tried to impose a labor contract that would render grocery jobs unfit
for almost anyone but teenagers living with their parents, the organization now
sheds crocodile tears over the prospect that McDonald's franchisees will have
to shutter their California drive-ins, depriving us of thousands of entry-level
positions. (As unlikely an event as that might be, it would be more than
compensated for by the instantaneous improvement in California's cholesterol
count.)