Posted on 10/26/2009 12:14:12 PM PDT by Lorianne
After claiming for more than a year that it could not do so, the Missouri Department of Social Services finally has obeyed a state law and published a list of employers whose workers get government-funded Medicaid health care coverage.
Yet compliance with the Medicaid reporting law may be only an experiment. Although the list is supposed to be published quarterly, the department says there's no telling when it will produce the report again.
As lawmakers in Washington, D.C., debate a national health-care overhaul, Missouri's experience shows how slow and difficult it can be for bureaucracies to implement even incremental changes in the health care system.
Missouri was one of several states to mandate employer-Medicaid reports in recent years as a way to gauge the extent to which government was picking up the slack for businesses that either didn't offer their employees affordable health insurance or paid them so little that they qualified for Medicaid.
Then-Gov. Matt Blunt issued an executive order in November 2006 requiring the Department of Social Services to produce a quarterly report, beginning in summer 2008, of each employer with at least 50 employees or their family members enrolled in Medicaid. In 2007, the Legislature put the requirement into law.
But no such report was produced the next year.
Instead, the department published a summary in summer 2008 stating that 589 businesses employed at least 50 people who either received Medicaid benefits themselves or had a spouse or child who did so. The report identified none of those businesses by name.
Officials at the Department of Social Services explained that they relied on a labor department database, and federal regulations barred the public release of its confidential information such as the names of employers. An agency spokeswoman said at the time that it would look for a different means of compiling the data so that businesses could be named in future reports.
Yet no report had been publicly released as of Oct. 14, when The Associated Press contacted the department to ask about it. Later that day, the department posted on its Web site a report dated July 31, which covered the employment period from January through March.
But the department again failed to follow the law's mandate to identify specific employers with workers enrolled in Medicaid, again citing the fact that it relied on the confidential labor department database. Instead, the report listed only a summary of work force sectors with Medicaid participants. (Retail trade led the way in raw numbers with 18,471 while the "administrative support, waste management and remediation" sector had the highest rate at 14.7 percent).
To cite the labor department data as a justification for not complying with the Medicaid reporting law "sounds a little bit to me like, 'The dog ate my homework,"' said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a Washington-based nonprofit group that been critical of government subsidies for corporations.
LeRoy noted that some states produced such reports by culling data from Medicaid applications that ask recipients to list their employers.
Missouri's Medicaid applicants also are asked where they work. That information is entered into a database by any of the department's 2,000 "eligibility specialists" spread across the state, said Scott Rowson, a spokesman for the Department of Social Services.
Asked if the department could use that data to produce a Medicaid-employer report, Rowson told the AP last Tuesday: "I don't think there's any time frame or specific effort to do that." He explained that the data was unclean, because there could be typos or variations in how state workers entered employer names.
Yet just three days later, the department released a report -- relying on that data -- that listed 172 specific businesses that employed at least 50 people enrolled in Medicaid health coverage for themselves or their families, covering the period of January through March.
On Friday, Rowson explained the stunning reversal by essentially saying he didn't know what was going on. He said other agency employees actually had been working on the full report for some time.
"It was certainly within our power. We're legally able to do it," Rowson said. "As it turns out, the process of scrubbing this data to make it usable and consistent takes awhile, and it's ready."
So here are the results. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which had a work force of about 39,000 people in Missouri, topped the list with 4,595 employee families on Medicaid. Second was Casey's General Stores Inc., which had 1,035 employee families on Medicaid out of a Missouri work force of more than 3,400. Third was the state of Missouri, which had 1,017 employee families on Medicaid out of a work force of more than 59,000.
Will the Department of Social Services, as required by law, now produce a similar report each quarter?
"That completely remains to be seen," Rowson said. "I'm not sure how often they're going to be able to do this."
While you may think you are getting a good deal at Wal-Mart, they are actually ripping you off by making you the tax payer fork out the money for their employees' Medicaid Coverage.
Ya’know I think the problem is your government that is paying for health care for people, not businesses that don’t. I can’t really find that area of the Constitution that tells a business to provide health care or how much to pay its employees.
No, and there is no place in the Constitution that says that I have to flip the bill for people’s Medicaid and Medicare.
We need to Abolish Medicaid and Medicare.
I don’t go to Wal-mart for anything any more. The only time I will go is to buy Sarah’s new book. Reason, they are banking that I will buy something else to make up for the loss that they are taking on the book. Ha, they are sadly mistaken. Now that would be a great protest that would have a big financial impact - if 10million folks joined me.
I remember years ago I worked as a Manager for one of WalMart’s competitors. Once day a social worker came in and put up a poster promoting the Food Stamp program. I noticed that if there were just one more mouth to feed in my family that I would have qualified. Did I:
a) dust off my resume, go out and find a better job?
or
b) spend the next twenty years engaged in political activism in order to get enough Progressives elected to office to force minimum mandated pay and benefits upon my employer?
(*it’s a trick question....they went out of business years ago)
I don’t think Walmart MAKES them take Medicaid.
Perhaps not, but they may suggest that their employees take Medicaid since their employees make the amount of money to qualify for Medicaid.
In any case, it is a good example of why we must abolish Medicaid and Medicare.
Wal-Mart pays 74% of the cost of health benefits for a single employee and contributes 67% of the cost of health benefits for family members (with no lifetime maximum expenditure on their plans—unusual for the retail sector), comparing favourably with the retail sector, which is 77% for individual employees and 68% for family members. At Wal-Mart, 81% of employees (both full-time and part-time) are eligible to receive healthcare insurance coverage, which significantly exceeds healthcare insurance coverage in the retail sector (61%) and is comparable to the 80% health insurance coverage economy-wide.
From http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-9925437/Demonising-Wal-Mart-what-do.html
Then why is it that Wal-Mart has 4,600 employees in Missouri that are on Medicaid?
I wonder how many Wal-Mart employees in the other 49 states, DC and Puerto Rico are on Medicaid?
Why? Because retail pay is low. Because it is cheaper for the employees to choose the gubmint option that pay their copay. This is a damning of gubmint not of retail stores.
Overall, 48% of Wal-Mart employees have health insurance, again comparing favourably with 46% in the retail sector. Arindrajit Dube and Steven Wertheim (2005) of the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education verify these figures in their 2005 study: in similar geographic areas, 45% of retail employees and 53% of large retail employees are covered by employer-sponsored healthcare insurance. According to results of a Kaiser Family Foundation survey undertaken in 2005, the proportion of Wal-Mart employees eligible for company healthcare benefits (73%) is comparable to other large employers and significantly higher than the retail industry average of 61%.
Read my other posts where I said:
Abolish Medicaid
Abolish Medicare
Agreed. Bashing Walmart plays into the hands of the left.
I will bash companies that exploit the American Tax Payer for Medicaid and had Hillary Clinton on their Board of Directors.
Then you play into the hands of the union left.
OK, then go ahead and continue shopping at a company that had Hillary Clinton as a board member.
Will do, thanks for permission to keep saving money. Where do you shop?
Whole Foods
Good choice, when they come to Spokane I may choose to spend some of my money there.
I might note that Walmart has many employees that are over 65 and therefore medicare entitled.
Because the government sets such liberal limits on who qualifies for government run health care, it is cheaper to go to medicare than “buy” insurance through your employer. This has NOTHING to do with Walmart, and everything to do with the governments ever increasing ability to qualify everyone for public assistance.
If this disaster passes with an option for states to opt out, those states that do refuse to participate will see their “poor” relocating to the ObamaCare states...a win/win situation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.