Why not make Minimum Wage $100/hr?
States Look For Ways To Help Uninsured:
At least 10 states are considering “pay or play” legislation that would require employers of a certain size either to provide basic health care coverage to employees or contribute to a state fund to cover public health care costs, says the study, by Hewitt Associates Inc., Lincolnshire, Ill.
That’s certainly an interesting proposal. I have my own proposal: Why don’t they just mandate that every company of a certain size provide a check for $100,000 to each employee every year. My own, admittedly poor, inductive reasoning tells me that people who have $100,000 in the bank don’t generally have a problem paying for health care. I think my solution will have the same effect as this “pay or play” legislation, only perhaps to a greater degree. After all, everyone will have $100,000! This solution will have the added bonus of solving poverty and hunger. I don’t know any truly hungry people who make six figures.
My employer doesn’t necessarily “provide” me with health care. They just budget a certain amount of money to pay me, a certain amount for my benefits, and a certain amount to pay taxes. All of that money could be used for my salary, if the other two categories didn’t exist, and it likely would, if they wanted to remain competitive.
Speaking of competition, that’s kind of the whole point of providing health care in the first place. In the end, whether you as an employer are spending a dollar on health care or spending a dollar on an employee’s salary, it has the same exact effect on your bottom line. Some employers can compete for employees without incurring the cost of providing health care to said employees. Some cannot. I happen to have a job where in order to remain competitive, my employer offers health and other benefits to its employees.
And 20 states are considering publicizing the names of companies whose employees receive public health care assistance.
What good does this cause? There’s been a big brouhaha in Georgia because 1 in 16 children in a public assistance program had a parent who worked for Walmart, and the media reports all implied that Walmart is taking advantage of the government programs’ “picking up the slack” because they don’t pay the employees enough. But what does that really mean? People in lower income brackets are going to be on public assistance, it seems, whether they are employed or not. Unless over 11,000 jobs were to magically appear, those people would be unemployed without Walmart. Why didn’t the media spin it the other way? The headline could have easily read “Walmart Gives More Poor People Jobs Than Any Other Employer In State”.
And, since I mentioned my job twice in this post– Everything I write here or anywhere else is my own personal opinion, and should not be construed to be the opinion of my employer. I claim full responsibility for my post, which is not written in any official capacity for any company.
April 27th, 2005 at 12:34 am
I heard about something similar about a week or two ago. I think it was New Hampshire who proposed a bill to “tax” or require contribution from every company in the state with over 10,000 employees. They referred to it as the Wal-mart bill because only one company in the state had 10,000 or more employees.
April 27th, 2005 at 12:35 am
would require employers of a certain size
The first time I read that I thought they meant people of a certain…girth. Like if you employ fat people you have to pay for their health care. Har har. LOL.
April 27th, 2005 at 12:53 am
Heh, well, technically, employers and employees all pay for disability insurance, and we all remember when Homer had to gain 61lbs to be able to go on disability! It’s easier than convincing your boss you have “Juggler’s Despair”, that’s for sure…
April 27th, 2005 at 7:04 am
Oh, Garrett, you’re making my heart hurt. Not because of your viewpoint on this issue (thought that does make me ache a little) - but because you used this, the dreaded triple redundancy and ultimate pet peeve of yours truly: “my own personal opinion.”
Gah!!
April 27th, 2005 at 2:30 pm
What if it were my adopted professional opinion?
April 27th, 2005 at 6:50 pm
I don’t think that would be as redudant. And here’s my reasoning. You see, by default, “opinion” carries the implication of being one’s “own” and “personal.” By qualifying it with “professional,” you specify that the opinion is based on professional experience and evidence in the area of question. Now, adding “adopted” to that is more iffy. I haven’t formed an opinion on that yet.
April 27th, 2005 at 7:16 pm
I guess. If I were a lawyer, doctor, or similar professional, I’d probably qualify all opinion statements with either “personal” or “professional”, in order to convey the correct sense of authority and to avoid the liability of appearing to be speaking from a professional perspective. And in fact, I did mean to stress the “personal” part since I wanted to make it clear it was not an opinion rooted in my work. You are right, though, it is indeed redundant.
April 27th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
I’d still enjoy hearing your own, personal opinion on the content of my post, if you’d like.
April 27th, 2005 at 10:03 pm
Nice post, Garrett. Economics should be a required course for anyone who ever wants to make any kind of suggestion about how to spend public (i.e., my confiscated) money to “help” the less fortunate. Of course, if they took that course in the “government” schools it wouldn’t do much good.
April 27th, 2005 at 10:08 pm
Heh, I’m more and more inclined to adopt defending Walmart as a pet cause alongside my longstanding goal of widespread economics education.
April 28th, 2005 at 2:24 am
That’s basically saying that we are to always accept and expect nothing more than the bare minimum. Sure, you have a shitty job that doesn’t pay a living wage and thus you cannot support your family, but shut up, at least you have a job and you shouldn’t challenge your employer! Sure, you live in a roach-infested dump of an apartment, but at least you have an apartment! Sure, your children are malnourished, but at least they’re not living on the street! And so on.
You know how I feel about healthcare. This would be one of my more “socialist” leanings. I feel that it is the responsibility of a good government to provide services essential to the well-being of its citizens, of which healthcare is one example. Sure, it might not be “fair” to make people pay taxes to support healthcare if they don’t use it as often, or whatever, but I see that as part of everyone contributing to the greater good. I see things like this as a necessity, and we would ALL be better off as a result.
April 28th, 2005 at 7:52 am
Well then, if we are to assume that the bare minimum is not an acceptable ideal (which isn’t what I ever stated), I’d like you to lay down as a concrete statement what you feel is owed to workers just by virtue of being humans. I mean, governments exist to protect human rights, right? What is owed to every worker just because they exist?
April 28th, 2005 at 6:21 pm
So….
Sure, you have a shitty job that doesn’t pay a living wage and thus you cannot support your family, but that’s not your fault… It’s your employer’s! Sure, your children are malnourished, but providing for your family isn’t your responsibility… It’s the government’s!
Whatever happened to trading something of value for something else of value? And letting the participants in this trade determine what they value?
You know that I feel like any “right” to healthcare is essentially the “right” to violate the rights of others. The fact that having medical care is often literally a life-and-death difference doesn’t change that fact. Food is a life-or-death necessity, but that doesn’t mean that when I grow a tomato, I don’t have the right to eat it myself, all of it. Do you only respect people’s ownership of themself (and thus their output) when it suits a political purpose of yours?
Look at history. When the government nationalizes an industry, the demand spikes, the cost increases and the quality decreases. At that point, government controls are imposed to restrict people’s choices, which get worse and worse, except for a few government elite and their buddies.
Oh, better off like the 54% survival rate for breast cancer patients under socialist care in Great Britain, as opposed to 75% in the U.S.?
Or better off like the 43% survival rate of prostate cancer under the British National Healthcare System, versus 81% in the U.S.?
Or better off like the 3-month average wait for an MRI in Canada, whereas I could walk into a clinic and get one today if I needed one?
An aside: Those numbers are pretty impressive when you consider how socialist our healthcare already is. Many people don’t realize how already mired in socialism we’ve already become, to the point where 45 percent of all healthcare spending in the US is directly spent by our government. (And “by our government” is a tragic misnomer, considering our government doesn’t really have money of its own. It should read “45% of all healthcare spending in the U.S. is extracted from working Americans at the point of a gun for that purpose.”) Also, in 2004 uninsured Americans received $125 billion of health care, of which $41 billion was provided totally free of charge.
April 29th, 2005 at 5:34 am
Don’t worry, I’m not ignoring you… I’m just trying to get 5 million things done before my trip to New York. (”I’ve told you a million times not to exagerrate!”)
I will respond to your responses, and your email, ASAP. 10-4 good buddy!
May 31st, 2005 at 7:31 am
Well now I really think you’re ignoring me. That or your trip to New York was extended a really long time.