While dining out at a trendy Italian restaurant during a recent vacation to California, I noticed a curious note at the bottom of the menu. It read: “A 3% charge is added by the restaurant to all checks to help offer fully-covered healthcare to all of our employees.” It struck me I hadn’t seen that before. Not that I cared all that much about the extra $2 — I support providing employees healthcare, of course — but I wondered why health care specifically was being broken out as a line item. It felt a bit like buying a hotel room, in which the $100 initial price ends up somewhere near $150 after the laundry list of additional fees. Turns out, according to the L.A. Times (http://lat.ms/1xkjzCD), many Los Angeles-area restaurants started adding the surcharge back in 2014 as a way to keep menu prices the same, while beginning to offer health insurance. I initially thought it was a political statement, but owners quoted in the L.A. Times insisted it wasn’t. But, why not just raise prices on the menu itself? The Times had the answer: “Costs such as rent and liability insurance often are calculated as a percentage of revenue, so prices would have to be bumped up higher than 3% to raise the same amount as a surcharge.” Still, before you go adding surcharges all willy-nilly, be aware that some customers reacted quite negatively when it was first introduced. We’ll have to ask Iowa Restaurant Association President and CEO Jessica Dunker her thoughts, but a quick Google search didn’t turn up any stories about Iowa restaurants adding the surcharge.