Last week’s rate hike in the U.S. is set to aggravate the interest burdens of Korea’s debt-saddled companies, including some struggling business units in the conglomerate sector. The ailing industrial segments include steelmaking and shipbuilding.

Though a ruling party lawmaker in July proposed a bill to reinvigorate business activities by offering a certain grace period and supporting their voluntary restructuring, it is still pending at the Trade, Industry and Energy Committee of the National Assembly.

The motion, dubbed the“one-shot law,” is aimed at preventing a large number of distressed firms from falling into insolvency by giving them the opportunity to regain financial soundness through business restructuring.

If the scheme is legislated, many businesses facing liquidity problems could enjoy a variety of benefits involving rollover of debt for about five years as long as they do not exploit legal loopholes.

To block their cash flow problems from having negative impacts on the overall economy, active coordination from the opposition party is urgent to pass the bill as soon as possible via a fine-tuning process.

If many listed firms face insolvency from snowballing debt, the government may have no choice but to pour in great amounts of taxpayers’ money into them, because a chain of liquidations -- with no emergency countermeasures -- is projected to deal a serious blow to the nation’s growth engines.

The one-shot bill is reportedly included in the list of 400 pending bills that lawmakers began deliberation for on Monday. The prospect for passage, however, is uncertain.

Data released by LG Economic Research Institute showed that 37 percent of the researched 628 firms listed on the main bourse or secondary KOSDAQ interest coverage ratios of less than 1 as of March 2015.

The interest coverage ratio -- or operating profit divided by interest costs -- is a barometer of how easily a company can pay interest on outstanding debt. A reading of less than 1 means a company cannot fully pay the interest with its operating profit.

This was a 10.2 percentage point increase in the proportion of firms that were ailing in about four years. Firms with a ratio below 1 took up 24.7 percent of the 628 firms in December 2010. Apart from small and mid-sized players, more conglomerate subsidiaries are reportedly included on the list.

On the other hand, the government should not be negligent in simultaneously looking into feasibly dubious intragroup stakeholding during the process of normalizing the struggling firms. The units may be used as a tool to strengthen conglomerates’ family ownership structures in a low-key manner.

On top of the possible side effects, a series of warnings from financial industry insiders appears more urgent.

A bank-based researcher was quoted by a news provider as saying that “aside from small and medium-sized enterprises, big firms have recently been suffering weakening profitability.”

While big firms saw their debts surge by about 90 percent over the past few years, the growth of their operating profit reportedly stood at around 50 percent.