Dumb Government Revisited: Gov Contractors Escape Paying Health Insurance.

Story in WSJ yesterday reminded me of an earlier post HERE where I called the federal government "dumb" because of its failure to collect back taxes from 30,000 federal Medicare providers.

Story yesterday in WSJ HERE, recounts that:

1. Federal government is missing opportunity to require federal contractors to provide health insurance (or dollar equivalent in fringe benefits) to employees by exempting industries from requirement where health insurance is "not typical".
2. Feds also have no system for collecting information on how many of the estimated 5.4 million federal contract employees have employer provided health insurance(or pay dollar equivalents in fringe benefits).
3. $3.16 per hour is currently provided as the fringe benefit equivalent to health insurance. (This seems to me to woefully inadequate to provide anything other than very limited individual [not family] insurance coverage).

With all the commotion about expanding health insurance it strikes me as plain "dumb" to NOT mandate that all government contractors must provide health insurance, or to require a realistic fringe benefit payment sufficient for the employee to pay for privately provided individual insurance, and to track and report health insurance coverage by each government contractor. (It would be equally 'dumb" to allow employees to collect the fringe benefit equivalent, spend it on something other than health insurance, and then enroll [at government expense] in Medicaid).

One way to expand coverage would be to allow private contractors to enroll federal contract employees in the Federal Employee Health Plan, with employees who enroll required to pay a share of the insurance premiums and co-pays just like federal employees, and with employers paying the majority of the insurance premium.