At Tuesday's Board of Supervisors' meeting Supervisor David Chiu's compromise health care security ordinance amendment that was supported by the business community passed on a 6 to 5 vote. Mayor Lee has announced his support for the measure so he will likely sign the measure by the end of the month and it will go into effect by January 1, 2011. The legislation will impact the way Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) are used to comply with the expenditure requirements under the San Francisco Health Care Security Ordinance.

Even though the legislation will vastly improve health access to workers in San Francisco and addresses all of the "loop holes" identified by Supervisor Campos, he continues to take a no-compromise position, repeatedly stating that our proposals were "non-starters". In fact, Supervisor Campos threatened to take his measure which would cost local businesses over $50 million a year to the ballot next year. We believe with the amendments to the current law that were passed on Tuesday and with the support of the Mayor and the majority of the Board of Supervisors we will be able to defeat any effort by Supervisor Campos to add to the all ready high cost of doing businesses and employing workers in San Francisco.

The GGRA will be issuing educational materials and conducting webinars over the next several months to help prepare members for the new requirements under the law.

The ordinance will:

• Require quarterly notice to employees about the amount of and how they can access their benefits.
• Require that an HRA expenditure be available to an employee for reimbursement for medical expenses for a minimum of 24 consecutive months - rolling by quarter.
• Allow for employees to access money in an HRA for reimbursement for up to 3 months after the employee separates from the job.
• Require employers that charge a health care surcharge on their bills to report the amount collected for health care from the surcharge to the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement.
• If the amount collected from a surcharge for health care exceeds the amount paid for health care then the employer must pay or designate an amount equal to the difference for health care expenditures to the employees.

Please contact Rob Black at rob@ggra.org with any comments or questions.