Coercion Lifted

From IBD:
Posted 7/24/2006

Health Care: Earlier this year we said the Maryland law that required Wal-Mart to pay more for employee medical coverage was part of the war against the retailer. Last week, the retail giant won a battle in that war.
U.S. District Judge Frederick Motz overturned the law, saying Wal-Mart "faces threatened injury" if companies with 10,000 or more employees (Wal-Mart would be the only company affected) are forced to spend 8% of their payroll on health insurance or pay the difference to the state, as the law demands.

Motz's ruling rested on his finding that Wal-Mart would have been harmed in "requiring it to track and allocate benefits for its Maryland employees in a manner different from that in which it tracks and allocates benefits for its employees in other states." The law imposes, he wrote, "legally cognizable injury upon Wal-Mart."
We hope that Motz didn't have to deliberate too long over his ruling. It should have been as routine as putting on a robe.

Maryland lawmakers have no right or authority to take over the operations of a private business. That federal law constrains them from doing what they did only made Motz's job that much easier, but he didn't need it.
Any law that interferes with the private exchange between employees and employers mutually agreeing to pay and benefits steps over the bounds within which governments should operate in a free-enterprise system.

Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich certainly understood that Maryland lawmakers overreached. He vetoed the legislation. But the legislature overrode his veto, and the bill, which is backed by unions and an assortment of other Wal-Mart haters, became law last winter and would have taken effect in January.

Motz's ruling last week isn't likely to be the last word on the Fair Share Health Care Fund Act. Maryland Attorney General Joseph Curran said he will appeal.

Should he fail, lawmakers will try to backdoor the bill by putting another name on it and tweaking it. Anything for political allies who control large blocs of votes.

We think they should use their time a little more constructively. Coercive policies that foster a hostile business climate, no matter what the feel-good quotient might be, are not the answer to a perceived uninsured problem in Maryland or anywhere else. Try something new, something other than the reflexive regurgitation of statist solutions that are always based on compulsion.

If Curran and the lawmakers feel Motz's ruling is a setback, they should consider how far Maryland's economy and standard of living will decline if they keep getting their public policy tips from unions and anti-business activists.