By CHRIS POWELL
For many years a strong current of thought within the Democratic Party and liberalism has argued for breaking the connection between employment and medical insurance. Why, it is asked, should people be stuck in jobs they may not like just because those jobs are their most practical way of getting vital coverage? It is said they should have realistic, inexpensive alternatives.
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The idea has been for government to create or facilitate mechanisms for people to get inexpensive medical insurance apart from an employer, either from government directly — what lately is called “the public option” — or with government subsidies for buying it, which is what the federal Affordable Care Act, “Obamacare,” is about.
It’s an important issue, since the United States is the only developed country to rely heavily on private employers to provide medical insurance. Indeed, in a television commercial this week for his campaign for renomination in the Democratic primary, Lamont called for a system of universal and affordable medical insurance.
But the commercial contradicted a legislative proposal he had made just days earlier. He proposed to tax large companies that don’t offer medical insurance to employees. The companies, the governor said, are “forcing their workers onto state public assistance, where taxpayers pick up the tab.” He would make large companies pay state government as much as $1,000 per year for each employee insured through the state’s Medicaid program.
Quite apart from tightening the link between employment and medical insurance, the governor’s premise is silly. No company “forces” its employees onto public assistance for medical insurance any more than any company “forces” people to work for it. Labor is free to choose both employment and medical insurance. If companies don’t offer insurance, it is probably because their employees are not highly skilled and not doing work covering the cost of both wages and insurance.
Similarly, people take jobs without insurance because they lack the skills or desire to land better jobs.
Indeed, in recent years Connecticut’s schools, by social promotion, increasingly have produced graduates of low literacy and job skills, forwarding them to adulthood qualified only for menial work even as the state’s manufacturers complain that they can’t find enough skilled workers for well-paying jobs offering good insurance.
Besides, contrary to the governor’s presumption, an employer’s medical insurance policy is not automatically good. An employer policy may be so limited and its deductibles so high that people may prefer to chance going without medical insurance if they are holding a job they can tolerate well, even as they might get a job with insurance if they were willing to do work they don’t like.
In any case the governor’s proposal to tax companies that don’t offer insurance is hypocritical. For it would exempt nonprofit social service agencies that are state government contractors doing welfare work, agencies whose employees receive much less compensation than state government pays its direct employees. Compensating the nonprofit agency employees better would be a big expense the governor doesn’t want to incur lest he have to reduce the generous raises he is paying to state government’s direct employees, soldiers in the Democratic Party’s army.
The governor’s proposal is also hypocritical since insurance under the state’s own Medicaid program is poor. Many Medicaid recipients face long waits for treatment if they even can find a doctor willing to accept Medicaid’s low reimbursements.
Poverty has been worsening in Connecticut but it’s not because of big employers skimping on medical insurance, nor because wages for low-skilled labor are low, as they always will be.
Poverty is worsening in Connecticut because the federal government and state government are increasing the cost of living, and because state government has failed to arrange for enough housing construction, has abandoned educational standards, subsidizes and thereby increases child neglect, and keeps raising taxes, particularly property taxes, without improving public services.
The governor’s scapegoating of big companies may help get him past the leftist challenge in the primary but it won’t make the state more prosperous.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 