Called "First Sunday," the first-in-the-nation program permits Bickford, Allen, Freeman and a dozen other full-time employees at MacLeod's Restaurant to operate one day a month for their own profit and pay insurance premiums with pretax earnings.
"It's a classic example of New England ingenuity. With regard to health care, I haven't heard of anything similar," said Wendy Webster, spokeswoman for the 150,000-establishment National Restaurant Association.
To make First Sunday fly, workers at the 20-table, wood-paneled restaurant agree to pool tips and deduct 35 percent from net sales for the cost of food. What's left over pays for their group coverage, which averages $120 a month for a single person and $250 for the family plan. Workers also appoint a team leader each month to coordinate promotion, preparation, ordering and scheduling - on-the-job-training that has the side benefit of exposing workers to the management side of the business as well as promoting the restaurant on an otherwise dark day.
To give the program a cushion soon after its October start, the restaurant also operated by First Sunday rules on Thanksgiving Day, serving a buffet lunch of turkey and trimmings to 170 customers.
"I think it's great that they have enough ambition to do it," said Kim Paul, a Bucksport mother of four, who ate a sandwich at the restaurant last week and anticipates stopping by some Sunday.
The idea, now in its third month of operation, is the brainchild of owner George MacLeod, 45, a native New Yorker and 1971 graduate of the University of Maine, who learned the importance of health insurance 14 years ago after a car accident. He said it would have left him "broke forever" had it not been for the insurance policy that paid for a series of surgeries.
