An influential group of America’s largest private employers is looking for somebody to bail them out of billions of dollars worth of employee benefit obligations the companies have accumulated.

Organized as the ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC), the companies provide health and retirement coverage for more than 10 percent of all working Americans. They say they want out of responsibility for paying for promised benefits because they’re “under stress” from “increased national and global competition,” as well as the federal government’s “complex, often contradictory, and inflexible rules governing benefits.”

They also face dangerous “exposure to volatile and often escalating financial commitments and litigation.”

ERIC’s proposed solution is in its just-released report, “New Benefit Platform Life Security,” that it says “is designed to spark new thinking. [To] encourage and incorporate new ideas that will increase the potential for higher levels of participation, improved cost efficiency, higher quality delivery systems, better equity, and, in the end, greater health and financial well-being for all Americans.”

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While allowing employers to continue individual arrangements, ERIC suggests federal laws facilitating regional sets of benefits administered by regional administrators competing on quality of management, design and on costs.

Employer contributions would be voluntary. All individuals would be mandated to have health insurance, with low-income subsidies from the government. Major federal initiatives are proposed to increase standardized cost-effective treatments regulation, connected health information systems, measurements of performance, transparency of costs and a uniform national regulatory structure. Standardized benefits, ERIC says, will increase portability across employers.

The report points out that although employees highly value their benefits, especially medical coverage — many treat them as an expectation — are overly insulated from their costs and resist expense-saving measures by hard-pressed employers.

Meanwhile, even these largest firms struggle with the growing complexity and legal liabilities of regulations and laws that often are unclear or mutually conflict. “[T]he need for the broad range of expertise can be overwhelming.”

While some of the proposals have widely-accepted merit, particularly improved information systems, better means of performance measurement, increased cost transparency, and greater cost-sensitivity by consumers, they are hardly “new thinking.”

All are currently being actively pursued but are in early phases of experimentation. A grand federal scheme is both premature and, based on usual government programs, would likely become stultified and suppress adaptation.

Although ERIC asserts that systemic cost-savings would result, it offers no program details, nor cost estimates. Given the experience with burgeoning government program budgets and entitlements, coupled with voter demands for growth in benefits and provider interest groups’ pressures on legislators to include their favorite treatments, there’s little reason to expect that such a grand scheme as ERIC proposes would do anything but add to government deficits and increase calls for tax increases.

There’s also little reason to believe that increasing the ability of legislators to micromanage benefits will not lead to new complexities of regulations.

But large employers and smaller would be relieved of many of their current costs. They could point to these regional arrangements as the “norm” and bail out of present employee benefits offerings. That, ultimately, is the objective.

It should be remembered that in the early days of the Hillarycare proposal in 1993, many of the largest employers and insurance companies were supporters because they saw it as a means of shifting their costs and claims liabilities onto taxpayers.

The large employers saw Hillarycare as a way out of their self-created legacy costs, while big insurers viewed the proposal as a means of making money as claims processors without claims risks. They only backtracked once individuals, smaller employers and insurers rebelled at the impracticalities, burdens and bureaucratic monster that would be created.

The ERIC proposal should meet a similar fate.

Democracy Project blogger Bruce Kesler is a former finance and business operations executive at various Fortune 100 companies. For the past two decades, he’s been an employee benefits consultant and broker based in Encinitas, Calif.