Requiring employers to offer most workers health insurance has long been seen as a crucial piece of Democratic efforts to overhaul the nation's health care system, but legislation that the Senate is expected to consider soon is unlikely to include any such mandate.

Instead, larger employers would have to pay fees of as much as $750 per worker to help any employee who needed government help to purchase a policy. Most individuals would have to buy coverage, and if they didn't, they too would face penalties.

The health insurance overhaul bills that the House of Representatives and the Senate Health Committee passed included employer mandates, but the Senate Finance Committee's version did not. Senate Democratic leaders are trying to merge the Finance and Health committees' bills into one measure for floor debate this week. Odds are that in the effort to get a bill that can pass, they will offer a compromise along the Finance Committee's lines.

. . . The mandate would cost the economy millions of jobs, warned the National Federation of Independent Business, the small-business lobby. It would mean "higher prices, fewer new store openings, limited store hours and services, as well as diminished tax revenues," the National Retail Federation said.

. . . Liberals see the mandate as "an essential component of health care reform . . .  necessary to ensure that firms do not drop coverage in substantial numbers and shift costs to taxpayers," wrote Robert Greenstein and Judith Solomon of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group.

About 159 million Americans are expected to get coverage from employer-provided insurance this year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Average premiums are $4,824 for single policies, essentially unchanged from last year, and $13,375 for families, whose policies cost about 5 percent more than last year. On average, single workers pay about $779 of that amount, while families pay $3,515.

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