Another very strange poll from California: apparently some small businesses can hardly wait to be taxed to provide health care to their employees. The oddly named “Small Business for Affordable Healthcare” actually advocates making health care unaffordable, through excessive taxation.

This group, established in opposition to the National Federation of Independent Business and other mainstream voices for small business, published a poll surveying 506 companies with fewer than 100 employees. About half responded, but the responses were bizarre. For example, 60% of the respondents did not offer health benefits, but 72% of those who did not thought that the government should force them to provide health benefits!

OK, so go ahead and offer health benefits. Who’s stopping you?

The poll would be a little less absurd if those respondents at least indicated that they did not offer health benefits because state over-regulation made it too expensive. Not at all: they wanted more government regulation. Two out of three--67%--advocated requiring insurers to offer coverage to small business regardless of the workforce’s health status; and 62% favored rate regulation. A majority wanted the state to compel health insurers to spend at least 85% of premiums on care.

Such regulations drive up costs by driving competitors out of the market, as these small businesses should well appreciate. Imagine if we suggested that their members have to get the state’s permission to set the prices at which they sell their goods and services, or the percentages of the various items that make up their income statements!

Even weirder, the respondents tended to favor compelling insurers to enroll people irrespective of health status (“guaranteed issue”). On the other hand, over half favored paying into a statewide pool “that bargains down costs.”

Hey fellows, you used to be able to do that voluntarily in California, through association health plans (AHPs). But the state messed that up by imposing guaranteed issue on AHPs a few years ago, driving up the costs and causing the market to collapse, and increasing the number of small businesses without health insurance.

O to be a small business in California! With friends like the “Small Business for Affordable Health Care,” who needs enemies?