play at Foxwoods Casino. In a
front page story in today's Hartford Courant, it is reported that
The state is paying an estimated $43 million annually for health care insurance to cover workers at the top 25 major employers, led by Wal-Mart, officials said yesterday.
Here's what's happening. Companies like Walmart, Stop & Stop, Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, and the Foxwoods Casino, among others, have such regressive work rules and health insurance policies that their employees are forced to use the State of Connecticut's HUSKY health insurance progam, a program designed to benefit children and the poor.
"Here is the richest retail company in the world, and we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing their coverage," said House Majority Leader Christopher Donovan, a Meriden Democrat. "I think people aren't aware of the extent that we're subsidizing the biggest, richest, most powerful companies. Wal-Mart shoppers need to know there's an extra cost of doing business."
This report speaks volumes about what's wrong with our corporatist society and in particular how broken our health-care system is.
Details below the fold.
The
Courant article [ED: by Christopher Keating, Ritu Kalra and Kenneth R. Gosselin] includes a table listing the top 25 companies and reporting how many of their employees are enrolled in HUSKY and estimates how much it costs the taxpayers.
For example, Wal-Mart, the biggest offender, has 1,028 employees enrolled in Husky at an estimated cost to the taxpayers of $5.44 million. That represents 11.2 percent of Wal-Mart's work force in Connecticut. According to the report, 73% of the Wal-Mart employees enrolled in HUSKY are working 30-plus hours per week.
A Wal-Mart spokesman tried to defend the company by claiming that "[w]e don't design our plans to be supplemented by public assistance." But that appears to be
a complete lie. Consider recent policy decisions made by Wal-Mart:
But a Congressional report last year found that Wal-Mart had increased the health-benefit waiting period for full-time workers. In 2002, the waiting period jumped from 90 days to six months. By comparison, the report found, the average waiting period for employers the size of Wal-Mart was 1.3 months.
It gets even worse.
The [Congressional] report also found that Wal-Mart changed the definition of part-time in 2002, raising it to 34 hours or fewer a week, up from 28 hours or fewer---a stricter definition than many companies.
This is just sickening. You work 34 hours a week at Wal-Mart and you're still not considered a full-time employee. Is that outrageous or what? How much do you want to bet that Wal-Mart pays its managers just to make sure that employees work exactly 34 hours a week and not a minute more.
And how about this for a regressive benefits policy: Part-time workers at Wal-Mart must wait two years to apply for health coverage and they cannot add a spouse or children.
Here's a list of the other companies mentioned in the report. (Some are Connecticute companies, but many are international firms.):
In decreasing order of how much they are shifting health insurance costs to the taxpayers, with the number of employees enrolled in HUSKY in parentheses: Wal-Mart (1028), Stop & Stop 916, Dunkin Donuts (663), McDonalds (606), Laidlaw Transportation (575), Mohegan Sun Casino (355), Shaw's Supermarkets (340), Burger King (284), The Home Depot (273), CVS (261), First Student School Bus (258), Foxwoods Casino (237), Fleet Bank--Bank of America (237), Filene's (226), ADECCO--Temp Agency (225), Care for Kids (205), Hartford Hospital (190), Wendy's (180), Friendly's (178), Companions and Homemakers (177), Family Care VNA (159), Target (151), Subway (144), Walgreens (129), and Sears (124).
That's a toal of 8,121 workers for whom taxpayers have to pay health insurance costs.
To add insult to injury, many of these companies are lobbying to hit up the state for tax cuts:
House Speaker James Amann said that businesses cannot expect the state to continue paying for health care coverage and cut corporate taxes at the same time.
Caveat: Not surprisingly, several of the companies cited in the article questioned the accuracy of the report's data regarding their employees. However, the report was produced by the Connecticut legislature's nonpartisan research office. State officials said that anyone applying for HUSKY must list his or her employer on the application, which is how the state came up with the data in the report.
Spread the word about this report. I'm sure the same thing is going on in other states.