The City of San Francisco created a
health plan for city residents without health insurance called Healthy
San Francisco. It is a sham. Fortunately commerce promptly found a
way around it.
Why is it a sham? There are no new doctors, medical workers or clinics. It is all the same as before except that people who formerly went to public health facilities and got billed some of the time, can now register, get a card and will never be billed for receiving the same services as before.
The city has additionally proposed a new tax that is falsely associated with Healthy San Francisco. Businesses are required to pay $1.80 per hour per employee either for health coverage or pay as a tax to San Francisco.
This tax is now applied to all employees. In this city, half of all wage earning employees don't live in San Francisco, so if their employer doesn't pay for real health coverage, half the employees in the city and their families wouldn't get any medical coverage under Healthy San Francisco.
Commerce also found away around the tax, bless our commercial minds. Businesses actually set aside the $1.80 in a health trust account to provide standard medical coverage. The businesses get back what the employees don't use. In the cases I've looked at, the cost of health coverage is now less than it was before the tax was introduced.
Our City fathers are bad fathers, but we seem to live good lives despite them.