Simon Perez
Reporting
(CBS 5) SAN FRANCISCO The San Francisco Board of Supervisors sent landmark legislation designed to provide uninsured city residents with basic medical coverage to the mayor's office for final approval, Tuesday.
The legislation, known as the San Francisco Health Care Security ordinance, combines a plan sponsored by Supervisor Tom Ammiano and a proposal from Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Restaurants like Rose Pistola in North Beach and certain other businesses rely on lots of hourly employees.
They say they just won’t be able to survive if the plan is approved.
Laurie Thomas owns Rose Pistola.
She says the new Health Care Security ordinance forcing businesses to pay to provide access to healthcare for all San Francisco citizens is just too expensive.
“This would increase roughly the cost of Rose Pistola I estimate by about $116,000, and we only made our operating income last year was $47,000,” says Thomas.
The ordinance will require many businesses to pay up to $1.60 per hour, per employee.
The idea is to give health coverage to the city's 85,000 uninsured residents.
Under the plan, all uninsured San Franciscans will be eligible to enroll in a program called Health Access, regardless of their employment status or any pre-existing conditions they may have. The program emphasizes preventative services such as primary care, laboratory services, prescription drugs and emergency care, according to the legislation.
"You can't have a volunteer system, it's not the Peace Corps,” says SF Supervisor Tom Ammiano. “People don't cough up, and the people who have not provided healthcare in the past really have an unfair competitive edge over those who do, and we wanted to right that ship-of-state as well."
Jim Lazarus at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce says businesses do want to participate but not on a pay-by-the-hour basis.
"The mandate on the other hand, unrelated to ability to pay, profitability, is really going to be problem and I think you'll see it challenged sometime in the next year," says Lazarus. "The basic question is whether or not the mandate is even legal."
The total cost of the plan runs close to $200 million a year, about half to be paid by the city. The rest will come from business contributions and payments, federal and state funding, and from individuals enrolled in the program.
The plan doesn't go into effect until next summer. Ammiano says there's still time to work out problems.
"We’re not out to get businesses, we're out to help and certainly in those regulations if we see someone's in trouble there are all kinds of things that could happen to act as a safety net," says Ammiano.
Ammiano is confident the ordinance will stand up to any lawsuit.
Business owners insist the money they pay should be based on how much money they make, not on how many employees they have.
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