When I sat down to lunch at Luna Park in San Francisco the other day, I noticed a postcard telling customers that the restaurant would be adding a $1.00 service charge per guest to each check to help pay for the health care of its employees. Say what? Recently, the city of San Francisco mandated that all employers within the city provide paid sick leave and health care to employees who work more than ten hours per week. Healthy San Francisco was unveiled with much fanfare by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had made it a campaign promise to provide universal health coverage to the city's large number of uninsured.

However, the program has exposed some interesting tensions and fault lines within this unabashedly liberal city. For while the goal of providing universal health care is something most San Franciscans would be happy to get behind, when the rubber hit the road, business owners of all stripes fought against it, concerned about being put out of business by the mandate.

So it was interesting to see one business's response to the requirement. Luna Park proudly passes off some of the costs to the customer in a straightforward way, stating, "Rather than raising menu prices, we have chosen to offset these costs by adding a $1.00 service charge per guest to each check. We wish to be able to maintain our menu pricing methods and represent our prices properly to our out of city guests." I liked that the restaurant was not only being honest with its customers but that it was also drawing attention to the issue (click on the thumbnail image to see how it looked on the check). It also made me wonder how other small business owners in the city are coping with the requirement.

It remains to be seen how the program will impact the health of its citizens--the mayor's hope is that by encouraging people to seek preventive care, the city can offset larger medical costs in the long run. In the meantime, it's a fascinating case study of how one major metropolitan city is responding to the health care crisis.