Trader Joe's explains itself. (And does it well.)
by digby
Last week there was a lot of discussion of the fact that Trader Joe's was cutting health insurance for some of its part time employees. The right wing went nuts as usual claiming this as more evidence that people were getting screwed by Obamacare.
The story is a little bit more complicated. An employee received this letter of explanation from the company and sent it to Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post:
Thank you for writing to us. It's possible you have been misled, at least to some degree, by the headlines in some articles regarding our reasons for implementing the [Affordable Care Act] in January. We'd like to take this opportunity to clarify some facts.
For over 77% of our Crew Members there is absolutely no change to their healthcare coverage provided by Trader Joe's.
The ACA brings a new potential player into the arena for the acquisition of health care. Stated quite simply, the law is centered on providing low cost options to people who do not make a lot of money. Somewhat by definition, the law provides those people a pretty good deal for insurance ... a deal that can't be matched by us -- or any company. However, an individual employee (we call them Crew Member) is only able to receive the tax credit from the exchanges under the act if we do not offer them insurance under our company plan.
Perhaps an example will help. A Crew Member called in the other day and was quite unhappy that she was being dropped from our coverage unless she worked more hours. She is a single mom with one child who makes $18 per hour and works about 25 hours per week. We ran the numbers for her. She currently pays $166.50 per month for her coverage with Trader Joe's. Because of the tax credits under the ACA she can go to an exchange and purchase insurance that is almost identical to our plan for $69.59 per month. Accordingly, by going to the exchange she will save $1,175 each year ... and that is before counting the $500 we will give her in January.
While we understand her fear of change, at her income level this is a big benefit that we will help her achieve.
Clearly, there are others who will go to the exchanges and will be required to pay more. That is usually because they have other income and typically a spouse who had a job with no benefits and they do not qualify for the subsidies under the ACA.
One example of that we had yesterday was the male Crew Member who worked an average of 20 hours per week but had a spouse who is a contract consultant who makes more than $200,000 per year. The Crew Member worked for the medical benefits and unfortunately for them they are likely to have to pay more because of their real income. We understand how important healthcare coverage is to our Crew Members and we are pleased to be able to provide and support this program.
We do hope this information helps, and we appreciate your interest in Trader Joe's.
It's true that the part time employee who is married to someone making over 200k a year is going to have to pay more. Probably a lot more. He or she won't benefit from the exchange. But really, that isn't unfair. The principle of this thing is that prices over all will eventually come down, which will benefit even people in the upper wealth percentile like these folks. And all the other advantages like the ban on denial for pre-existing conditions and lifetime caps on spending will already work for them. So it isn't a complete bust for this person.
And it's evidently a better deal for the part-timer who isn't married to someone who makes a lot of money. She just didn't know that.How could she? The good news is that Trader Joes has decided to explain all this to their employees (and their employees are sharing it with the press.) It's going to take efforts from every quarter for people to understand these changes and with the right wing doing everything in its power to make that effort fail, it's more important than ever that the private sector fills in the gaps wherever possible. It's all very confusing and the wingnuts are taking full advantage of that.
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