Whole Foods Will Cut Health-Care Benefits for Nearly 2k Employees
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If those resources are not money, then the employee is really out of luck as they likely will not be able to afford whatever those alternatives are. In addition, there is no way you can take a bunch of people that work 20 hours per week and let them work 30, no need for that many scheduled hours, just fancy corporate communications.
Amazon has the right to do whatever they want to increase Shareholder value; however, shareholder value is the root of the modern trend of devaluing people and treating them as line items in an expense report. Many of these people likely have this job primarily for the health insurance it provides.
I think it is time for the US to switch to a universal healthcare system. Removing the responsibility of corporations to manage health care would free up a large amount of resources they could invest in expansions, wage increases (likely c-suite bonuses). In addition it would allow individuals, especially working parents to more freely make employment decisions and find careers that are both financially but also emotionally rewarding. I think it would have a major impact on the working structure of this country. Not to mention it would allow people to actually go to the doctor when they need to.
It's a pretty terrible market out there if you don't have an employer subsidizing it and using their size for negotiation leverage.
No, we can't. If we could, we would. Things are like this because we want them to be like this: it's reflected in how we vote. We've had candidates pushing for "Medicare for all", universal healthcare, etc., and who gets elected? The candidates promising to go the other direction. Clearly, American society and its voters do not want this.
Just because Universal Healthcare didn't catch on the first time doesn't mean it's dead forever.
It'll happen eventually. Maybe in 4 years, maybe in 40.
don't know how it is in the US, so this may look uninformed, but are you getting extra $$$ added to your salary, equivalent to what the employer was paying for the insurance?
Edit: My wife though pays more for her company insurance as they would need to insure me as well.
Typically people opt out of company insurance because of one of the following reasons: It's cheaper for them to find services through the marketplace (extremely uncommon, but possible), They have superior insurance through a spouse or family member, they feel that the insurance they're provided with isn't sufficient and they would prefer to purchase better insurance themselves.
All of that aside, it's impossible to know how much you're actually going to visit the doctor aside from chronic ailments.
Personal commentary:
As someone from New Zealand, who moved to Canada, I still don't understand why people would want the responsibility of their employer and themselves to choose what health coverage they want in life, especially when employment tenure can be upended so easily.
Yes I know, USA has funky research and new drugs and whatever, but as a whole, it doesn't seem like a particularly efficient system. So if it's not efficient, what's its objective? For me it sounds like prioritising medical providers to extract the maximum amount of revenue from captive customers, in a scheme where all the prices are similar so it's not a monopoly, but none of them are cheap, so it's nearly like a cartel.
Citations: (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Private companies also use accounting and sometimes do not look out for their employees.
This isn't to nitpick, I just think there are other parts of the problem, not just shareholder value.
Although, yes, there might be additional pressure from shareholders when a company's finances are public, I don't see how it could be the root of the problem when the same thing happens in private businesses.
Why are wages in Europe lower than the US, even after adjusted for health insurance expenses? Americans have far more disposable cash than Europe even when health insurance is considered. Why is that?
Health insurance is one of the strangest insurances - a single month costs more than a year or often at least 6 months of car insurance.
Honestly I wish someone would just be a whistleblower and reveal the profits and operating costs (claims) of an "expensive year" at a health insurance company. The government would likely have a price collusion case.
Now we’re paying from our paychecks, then paying again at the doctor, then getting billed, then waiting for the EOB from insurance, then taking hours a month to manually match up the EOBs with the bills to verify who to pay and how much. And then, MAYBE by the end of the year you reach your deductible and insurance starts actually paying.
They call this a benefit??
No they don't, they still have to follow relevant laws.
You have a point about universal healthcare, there's a few other things that could help in this situation though. In the EU I believe this would fall foul of anti discrimination laws (this affects only part time workers, part time works are more likely to be women). There are also protections against an employer unilaterally lowering peoples compensation.
These employees are now put into the ACA exchanges. They can shop for insurance there, and their premiums are capped at a certain percentage of their income. The feds cover the difference. Now these employees don't have to rely on their employer for health insurance.
This was the dream of the ACA. Employers would get out of the insurance game and send their employees into the exchanges. It didn't work it out that way in reality, but this is what that looks like.
The really frustrating part of this also comes with the fact that he's trying to get his GED to hopefully get a higher-paying job with benefits, but the GED exam apparently requires that you have coverage.
I took my GED back in 2009 and I don't remember having to supply any information about whether I was insured.
I can ask him tonight for clarification.
I don't even see the UK on these lists.
CT Scanners: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266539/distribution-of-e...
MRI Machines: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282401/density-of-magnet...
Perhaps the UK should be on the list, but somewhere near the bottom:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2672902/Deadly-shor...
Granted it's from 2014, but are you disputing the following facts as reported then?
"The report shows the UK has only 5.9 MRI units per million people, less than half the OECD average of 13.3."
"On CT scanners we are 30th out of 32 countries, in front of only Hungary and Mexico. The numbers concern only NHS scanners."
The source is irrelevant.
You seem to suggest that having the availability of life saving equipment is BAD if a profit is being made, but a lack of life saving equipment is GOOD if no profit is being made.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/25/gp-appointme...
I imagine if the story is credible, the issues wouldn't just be with cancer treatment.
It’s sort of the national religion that the NHS is “the envy of the world” but it’s really only the envy of the US. Ask any French or German or Egyptian if they are envious of it...
I am from Mexico and I envy the NHS. I have had the necessity of using the Health system in NHS, IMSS (Mexico) and Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung (Germany), and from the 3 of them, I will choose the NHS with my eyes closed.
The two attributes together tie most people into some degree of modern indentured servitude for the very wealthy--there just happen to be many layers in between people and the extremely wealthy trying to obscure that fact.
Yes, there is a degree of freedom of choice but employment policies converge to benefit employers across industry so the choice is between an red and yellow apple.
If we're going to get that upset over a children's card game, it follows that we're going to get upset over things that actually matter.
For example if you are running for a congressional seat which is 50% republican voters and 50% democrats I would imagine that being a moderate centrist is probably a relatively good strategy.
If the seat is 80% one side then probably you want to be much more extreme in that direction because what the other 20% thinks doesn't matter so much.
However I agree, the internet was meant to make us all open minded and tolerant and yet has had the opposite impact.
That seems like a very narrow view point. We have so much freedom in the US, but many people put blinders on then insist their somehow slaves.
You can buy a house in Tennessee for less than one years rent of a studio apartment in NYC. But you don't want to live there? That makes you a slave to your own desires.
So what is your point?
If you had to design a system from scratch now there is no way you would come up with employer based health insurance. It’s a stupid system. Bad for citizens and bad for employers.
Tying health care to employment is a formative cause of wage slavery. It should not stand--and that's before you even get to the economic inefficiency of the health care market itself.
This has several unintended consequences:
1) People stay in jobs they hate just for the insurance. This harms both the company and the individual.
2) It reduces entrepreneurship. In Canada if I want to start my own company, I don't have to worry about losing health insurance.
3) Children don't work (yet I guess) and old people don't work, so you need other systems to cover them, or just not cover them at all.
Are there any groups that offer health insurance (at a cost) with membership? Ex: IEEE, entrepreneurial groups, etc.
I don't have to pay anything for my health coverage.
And before you say, I do through taxes, my tax rate can be pretty low if I have minimal income, which is often the case when starting a new business.
Now why dental is not part of medical coverage is beyond me, but that's another topic.
Having employees depend on their lord^H^H^H^Hemployer for their very physical existence... how medieval.
You are looking at it wrong (to be direct). You can get all the health insurance disconnected from employment you want just like any other self-employed and independently affluent people get. It's there, freely available to you. No one is stopping you. Ironically, you can even get that insurance when you are employed, even though you will literally pay a massive penalty for being employed by doing so in the form of the unrealized and hidden cost of the un-utilized employer contribution to the health care cost, which you would then have to pay out of pocket on top of that. (tip, if you want to decouple health insurance from employers, go for the tax advantages of providing health insurance plans ... which touches on the origins of this damn mess caused by the do-gooders fools that demanded employers provide health care in the past).
The real problem is a perception issue that people do not understand the true nature and cost of health insurance/care which also leads them to not understand that their employer puts up many times more in health insurance costs than the premiums the employee pays every month. The problem is a perception problem, and a health care cost problem at its core, and the employment dependency issue is really just a secondary issue that is utterly meaningless.
What does it matter whether you could sever and ban employers from even offering health insurance under a glorious socialist authoritarian regime while racing towards communist demise? Does it matter whether you pay $200 and your employer pays another $700 every month in premiums, or instead your employer simply just adds another $700 to your paycheck per month and you pay the full $900 for health insurance every month out of pocket? All other things being equal, I argue it's the same thing, because math.
Reality is that it's a cost issue that directly is derived from a corruption issue. For example, before the government committed fraud, aka, stole, and handed the health sector (insurance and care) trillions of dollars in profits through the ACA, aka Obamacare, (do not believe me, confirm it yourself if it makes you uncomfortable that I am questioning your messiah Obama, just look at the health sector stock market pre and post ACA [1]), which is one of the sources of corruption that has driven the cost of health care up from (single person example) ~$100/$500 employee/employer split cost for health insurance before ACA to ~$200/$700 post ACA.
The other corruption that has been driving up health care costs and therefore defrauding people is (which his true, regardless of whether one is able to accept it or not) due to the millions of "immigrants" both "legal" and illegal, that have been transported into the USA to defraud the American citizens that are part of the 99%, which put massive amounts of load on the health system with ailments, diseases, and conditions; many of which were essentially unknown and/or eradicated in the whole of the western world before just a few years ago.[2 (which is not quite the full extent but a thread that can be pulled on if one wants] When citizens who are being financially enslaved to pay for the health care of millions of "immigrants" from the third world with degenerative diseases and conditions, it is going to cost and that cost will always be and it is going to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions per individual. And no, that is not an exaggeration. The information can be relatively easily uncovered even though I do not have the ability to pull it up right now for citation.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2016/07/28/overwh...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2018/02/26/how-am...
> Leadership has been told that all PT TMs will not be able to work more than 19hrs a week and that even those originally grandfathered from this restriction are now included in this new policy. Additionally, “difficult discussions” would have to take place with these TMs. PBS even sent out a list of all PT TMs in the store that fall into this category. It sounds like a lot of misinformation is circulating throughout the stores and company. Hopefully it will all be sorted out and PT TMs will be able to work up to 29hr weeks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wholefoods/comments/d3r04k/amazons_...
Amazon Will Cut Health-Care Benefits for Nearly 2k Whole Foods Employees
I am guessing that due to the food perspective of the blog they focused on the Whole Foods aspect of the story, but this is clearly a dystopian corporation story, not a grocer story.
While it's unfortunate for those effected, it seems mostly a way to get more availability out of their employees rather than purely a cost savings measure.