They get health care?! Take it away, quick!
Bezos is a bajillionaire, and part-time workers at Whole Foods are having losing their health insurance. Hey that’s capitalism! Bajillionaires don’t get their bajillions by spending any percentage of said bajillions on their workers if they can possibly help it. But this is great, it teaches workers not to be dependent – on either the state or the employer – but to go out there and build their own healthcare out of the trees they cut down on their homesteaded farm, as our grandparents did.
(Remember that news item the other day about Charles Koch spending millions of his precious stash to keep workers from getting better pay or benefits, so that they wouldn’t be dependent? Yeah. That.)
Amazon.com Inc.-owned Whole Foods Market is changing medical benefit eligibility requirements next year that could leave as many as 1,900 part-time workers without coverage.
Employees will have to work at least 30 hours a week to qualify for a healthcare plan beginning Jan. 1, up from the current eligibility requirement of 20 hours, the company said in an emailed statement. The change will affect just under 2% of the chain’s workforce, Whole Foods said.
If they’re in school or have another job that makes it impossible for them to work 30 hours a week at Whole Foods? Well then they can’t have health care, that’s all. They should have thought of that before they decided to be Americans.
Makes me wonder how much longer you freeeeedom luvvin ‘Mercans will put up with this shit, or are you just so ground down that there is no energy left to fight?
Of course, things are no better here in The Magical Land of Aus where we have an assortment of Government members trotting out the line “The best sort of welfare is a job” as if we could just all stop being unemployed and take up the millions of non-existent unfilled jobs.
I am closing my business and losing almost everything I have because our great economic managers think the Nation’s most pressing needs are bashing the poor and ensuring religious bigots get a better platform for their bigotry. We have a state government that lambasted the previous government for failings in hospitals, and they have discovered the best way to fix that is to sack a whole pile of Doctors and Nurses.
Or there’s this
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/the-card-declined-and-i-broke-down-life-on-the-cashless-welfare-card-20190913-p52r02.html
Your lot, our lot, peas in a pod.
Worse than that. A lot of people are fighting on the other side, to maintain the system that craps on them. We are raised from birth on the miracle of capitalist free markets and that government paying for anything is bad. Many people are convinced that it will be worse, much worse, if we actually allowed everyone to have health insurance or adequate food or a decent place to live. That would be awful, because socialism – a word very few Americans actually understand but all of them are sure they do.
And the pundits are more than happy to explain this on the news regularly. The Democratic debates are a masterpiece of people rushing to assure Americans they are not going to end for-profit insurance (though they don’t call it that – they call it insurance choice, which is part of the problem. For profit might accurately depict what it is we are all supporting, while insurance choice sounds oh, so American…). In addition, there are movies that show the horrible, horrible state of socialized medicine in other countries, and rich people sneaking over the border to get health care here where we do it right.
Most of my “liberal” friends are deathly afraid of single payer, and claim that our insurance is just so, so great. Really? When I have to pay so much in co-pays on my drugs just to stay alive, because none of my asthma meds are on the formulary. When I get my emergency room care denied as trivial because the diagnosis isn’t severe enough to justify a Sunday morning visit, when it has me lying on the floor of the waiting room in pain while the receptionists ignore me (though there were literally no other patients there) because they just aren’t interested in helping me at that moment – and my symptoms are identical to those of a woman with a heart attack (I wasn’t having one, fortunately, but the symptoms were there). When I have to go through several attempts to have a needed surgery, because the insurance company will do anything not to spend a penny of “their” money to meet my needs, and must be persuaded.
This is the “wonderful” insurance the Democratic candidates are refusing to replace with single-payer. Because the Americans have been so hoodwinked they think our health care is the best in the world, and that we have better access to health care than in any other country in the world, including Mars and the Moon (which I worry some Americans might actually think are part of our world. I’m never sure).
WELL then, if it only affects “under 2% of the workforce”, then who cares? Measly 2%. They don’t deserve to be treated like humans with actual needs.
Well, the USA does have the best healthcare in the world. If you are unimaginably wealthy and important enough to gain access to the bleeding edge capability held by comparatively few institutions. New Zealand has a stressed healthcare system like all western nations and for the same reasons. Demographics and the ever spiralling costs of skilled labour, drugs and equipment. Even so, me manage a longer lifespan than the US at a cheaper cost without much of that bleeding edge treatment. Thanks to a public health system that if not free, is at least very low cost on an individual basis. It doesn’t stop some from wanting to tear the system down and adopt the US system. They seem to think that on a modest income they are individually going to get the sort of research grade treatment Steve Jobs got to extend his life by a year. Deluded.
This is the thing that gets me with the argument against universal healthcare – you know the one that goes “Well it will cost me more because my employer pays for my health insurance, and the difference wouldn’t go into my salary, so it will cost me more.”
Sure, but your employer could just stop paying for that benefit, and there is not a terrible lot you could really do about it because the same people who tell you how wonderful the insurance companies are, are the same ones who have spent the past five to six decades undermining the unions.
And lets not get into how this means if you do have a health issue, you are rendered unable to resign from a bad working situation that pays for your healthcare because doing so comes at a risk to your life.
A while back there was an article about how groups of Americans are basically going over the border to Mexico to buy medication.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/11/691467587/americans-seek-cheaper-meds-in-mexico
America’s rightwing likes to claim that universal healthcare would mean immigrants pouring over the borders to “take advantage” of it, well you’ve healthcare refugees going the other way.
This is the reason why I think the Democrats should go with either Sanders or Warren (My preference being Warren because I think Sanders is too old by this point), because they’re the only ones who will actually change anything.
Democrats in general so far as I can see are constantly assured that they must compromise before the negotiations over policy even begin, so you have a position which is at best something you might settle for then being further watered down to the point where it is something the sodding Republicans were suggesting 10 years ago.
I get you, iknklast and Rob.
In 1972 Australia had elected its most left wing government ever. It instituted Medibank, a universal health system, funded, in part, by a small levy on wages and salaries. That government was fought at every turn by the forces of capitalism, greed, and especially the doctors railing about “Socialised medicine” and being at the mercy of the government.
The great experiment was unwound after 3 years with the election of a corporate government, and Medibank was no more. It was back to high cost, poor quality health care.
In 1984 Australia’s most Right Wing Leftist government reestablished universal health care, under the name Medicare. The same forces of greed that destroyed Medibank also tried to stop, and then destroy Medicare.
By the time the Corporatists regaind government, the people of Australia had enjoyed the benefits of Medicare for 12 years, and the incoming government was afraid to do more than tinker with it.
Now, its staunchest defenders are The Doctors.
Private Health Insurance is in terminal decline, even though the government props it up with a 30% subsidy omn premiums. Young people see no need to join as they are generally in good health and have no need of the extra cost burden. Middle-aged people are seeing the value less and less, and are dropping out. It will soon be only the chronically ill and elderly left paying premiums.
Roj, I meant to say I’m really sorry to hear about your business. Quite apart from the issue of livelihood, which is critical, there is a lot of pain in seeing something you’ve worked hard at fail.
Oh, don’t worry, Whole Foods will make sure that no one works more than 29.5 hours a week on the clock.
Exactly. I would add, elderly. As a 59-year-old asthmatic with diabetes, I am stuck with my employer, even though they have been declared a toxic work environment by our union (which seems unable to do a thing about that except to kinda ask that they be nicer, please). And I am told we have “wonderful” insurance. I had better insurance 40 years ago before I ever heard of HMOs and PPOs and POSs (that last being an apt descriptor of much insurance). There was no formulary. There was no co-pay, it was just the insurance paid 80%. And the full cost of the meds then was cheaper than the co-pay now.
I have talked to a number of doctors who struggle with our current insurance system because they have to maintain an entire office of staff to deal with the endless requirements of highly variable insurance companies. They give discounts to people without insurance because they don’t have to wander through that labyrinthe. And still they advocate for maintaining our current system, because they are afraid they would make less money on single payer (and they might but seriously…)
One doctor was explaining it this way: It is simply impossible for anyone to live on only $120 an hour. I wish I could find out how difficult it was to live on $120 an hour! Few of their patients make anything close to that. It’s a disgrace.
Yes, what doctors do is important, but so is what teachers do. And garbage collectors. And cooks. And child care workers. No one talks about how we have to pay them because their work is important. And while garbage collectors and cooks may not require college, so don’t have student loan, teachers do. A lot of child care workers these days have at least a 2 year degree.
So the answer is single payer, and free college so doctors can’t complain about student loan debt. And pay working people better so they can afford the same things other people get to enjoy. It’s not “socialism” , it’s humanism. That is the tide that would lift all boats, rather than our current situation where a rising tide drowns all but the yachts.
In the interests of transparency, one of the issues NZ has with primary healthcare is an ageing cohort of General Practitioners (family doctors). This has been caused in part by younger doctors not wanting to live in rural, regional or poor districts and in part by a poorly designed and implemented subsidy scheme. Doctors have the choice of charging whatever they want for an appointment (and foregoing the government subsidy) or accepting the government subsidy and having their maximum fee capped. When the scheme was introduced the result was fair and reasonable. However, successive Governments have allowed the subsidy to fall in real terms, while the cap has not risen sufficiently in real terms. This has made a GP practice less appealing in terms of income potential, which of course exacerbates the reluctance to move to poor and rural areas. This error in implementation isn’t the full story of course. Changing demographics and lifestyle choices play a role as well. It is noticeable that many GP’s now choose to work part time hours and accept a lower, but still reasonable income as a trade off for lifestyle. Some regional centres are well served by GP’s and hospital doctors because they are also popular lifestyle centres (Nelson and Queenstown for example). This is fixable by allowing better tension between subsidy and pricing, with perhaps the government providing a lower visit subsidy for people who are healthy and wealthy – i.e. better targeting of the resource. Not the American way I know, but then more civilised.
Thanks Rob. At 67, I’m ready to retire. Just didn’t want to go this way, but Such is Life.
Here’s a 59-year-old piece in which a Canadian doctor explains why socialized medicine is actually good for doctors, patients, and society in general: http://archive.macleans.ca/article/1960/8/22/a-doctors-case-for-state-medicine (full disclosure: the author was my grandfather)