Unions and Their Allies Are Ensuring Corporations Don’t Pass Health Care Costs to Taxpayers Jan. 25, 2006—In Olympia, Wash., where Paul Henry receives health care coverage working at a grocery store, he worries that large employers who don’t provide sufficient employer health care are creating a pattern that will undermine his own family's health coverage. Henry also doesn't like his tax dollars subsidizing those same companies, including Wal-Mart, whose workers are forced to rely on Medicaid or the state-subsidized Basic Health Plan.
Speaking Jan. 19, 2006, to a state Senate committee hearing on a bill that would require the state’s largest employers to pay a percentage of their employees’ health care costs, Henry said his employer-provided health insurance gives him “peace of mind” in taking care of his family.
A confidential state report obtained this week by The Seattle Times shows more than 3,100 Wal-Mart employees in the state—about 20 percent of its workforce—receive tax-payer funded health care for themselves or their families. The 3,100-plus workers is nearly double the total for any other company in the state. More than half of the Wal-Mart employees who received federal Medicaid benefits—nearly 1,800—were full-time workers.
When such large companies as Wal-Mart don’t provide affordable health care for their workers, it puts companies that pay good wages and offer decent benefits at a competitive disadvantage, says Robby Stern, special assistant to the president of the Washington State Labor Council.
“It’s inhumane to let people go without health insurance,” said Stern, who also testified before the Washington State committee. Stern and other Washington activists are seeking to build on recent success in Maryland, where working families and their allies in the state legislature succeeded Jan. 12 in passing a bill to ensure employers pay their fair share.
AFL-CIO Launches Fair Share Campaign in Dozens of States
To ensure the largest corporations stop shifting health care insurance costs onto workers, taxpayers and other businesses, the AFL-CIO is spearheading a Fair Share Health Care campaign with working families, their unions and community allies mobilizing around Fair Share legislation in dozens of states.
Fair Share legislation has been introduced in Florida, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Wisconsin in the 2006 session and is in the pipeline in more than 20 other states. On Jan. 23, 2006, the Oregon AFL-CIO filed a ballot initiative to put Fair Share Health Care on November’s ballot.
In Washington State, more than 200 union members from AFL-CIO unions, the unaffiliated United Food and Commercial Workers and other unions attended the Fair Share Health Care hearings and lobbied lawmakers.
In general, Fair Share Health Care legislation requires large, profitable corporations to spend a certain percentage of their payroll to provide health care benefits for their employees or pay into a state health care fund. Fair Share will reduce the price taxpayers pay to cover profitable employers’ employee expenses, ease the financial strain states face in growing Medicaid costs and help level the playing field between companies that provide good jobs and benefits and those that don’t.
“Most large employers do provide health care. The idea here is to hold the ones who don’t accountable so they are not undermining the structure of those who do,” says Rep. Eileen Cody (D), who sponsored the Fair Share bill in Washington.
Several business owners also testified in favor of the Fair Share Health Care legislation, including Craig Cole, CEO of the 29-strore chain Brown & Cole Stores.
“The real problem here—the public is picking up the tab for what should be Wal-Mart's responsibility,” he said.
Corporations Cut Health Coverage While Number of Uninsured Soar
The number of Americans without health insurance continues to climb—from 41 million in 2000 to 46 million in 2004, according to government statistics—even as more corporations are cutting back employer-based health coverage. In 2000, 69 percent of firms offered health coverage to workers, but in 2005 that percentage dropped to just 60 percent. In fact, more than a quarter of all firms with more than 500 employees don’t offer employer-based health insurance for workers and their families, according to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan private foundation that supports independent research into health care issues.
As more firms drop health insurance coverage, workers, taxpayers and other businesses are forced to pick up the tab. Some workers buy their own health insurance or pay out-of-pocket for health care costs. Other workers and their families are forced to turn to such taxpayer-funded programs as Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, costing taxpayers some $21 billion a year, according to the Commonwealth Fund.
For example, 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart’s 1.33 million U.S. workers are either uninsured or on Medicaid, according to Wal-Mart’s own information. In addition, fewer than half of Wal-Mart’s workers have health care coverage on the job, according to an October 2003 AFL-CIO report.
As a result, many Wal-Mart workers and their families turn to emergency rooms and other public health services as their only health care option. In 12 of the 13 states where data has been released and analyzed, Wal-Mart workers rely on public health programs more than workers from any other company in those states.
The Commonwealth Fund also estimated employers with employee health coverage are forced to spend about $31 billion a year to cover the cost of employees shifting the health care costs of their uninsured family members to their employer-provided coverage.
With Republican extremists roadblocking working family legislation on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.—Republicans hold a majority in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate—union activists and their allies are turning to the states to win crucial working family legislation on improving access to health care, raising the minimum wage and more.
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