McDonald’s says its health care provider (Aetna) cannot meet the new federal requirement that the insurance company spent 80% of its income on actual health care. Linky to the Wall Street Journal Article
German insurance companies can meet this requirement. Taiwanese insurance companies operate at freakin’ 2% profit. Japanese companies can do it.
Apparently Aetna and McDonald’s management teams are much too stupid to meet this requirement and is threatening to stop allowing hourly workers to buy insurance coverage. But be certain that the coverage of salaried workers will not be cut.
Just the coverage of the poor people.
And yet, for some reason the American people are going to give the GOP the House. Screw McDonald’s! Screw Aetna!
Ummm…Paul, did you even bother to read what you wrote?
How do you get from that to saying that McDonald’s tells its hourly workers to drop dead? Did the thought never cross your mind that McDonald’s might…ya know…actually drop Aetna and go with another provider to continue coverage?
Apparently, no change is being made at the moment, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to see that happen in the future.
McDonald’s is presently allowing the hourly people to buy health insurance. (did you see the graphic of the coverage? It is quite gruesome.) They are now asking for an exemption to the policy that the insurance company increase coverage or decrease rates in order to meet the 80% goal.
The coverage is a rip-off and McDonald’s is fighting a requirement to make it less-sucky.
What a slur! What a slander! McDonald’s cannot deny anyone the right to health insurance, that’s simply untrue! Anyone in America can buy health insurance, they only have to pay for it!
McDonald’s and Aetna make a lot of money selling this sham coverage. The truth is that these employees don’t have insurance, even though they are paying for it.
2000 won’t cover a trip to the ER.
Oh and** Clothahump, PinQ** was making a play on a famous news headline from the 70’s.
I’m confused. Most restaurants don’t offer insurance, McDonald’s does. According to the article, this mini-med program is sufficient to cover the medical bills of 85% of the participants. Also according to the article, the reason they can’t meet the requirement of the new law is because of high administrative overhead from high turnover. This will apparently also affect a lot of colleges and several other major companies.
So, McDonald’s is providing something they don’t really have to that is sufficient for a huge majority of the participants, and the new law, which forces them to increase benefits without increasing costs will make it cost prohibitive, and somehow McDonald’s is the bad guy here? If anything, you should be pissed at all the other restaurants that, up to this point, haven’t been providing health insurance.
I also fail to get the random GOP stab at the end of the OP. It seems to me that the law was poorly considered for these sorts of cases.
Perhaps my jab is simply random, but please allow me to restate the problem.
McDonald’s does not offer ‘free’ health care to its factory-floor workers. It does allow them to buy policies from Aetna. Under the plan offered, a premium of $727 buys you a policy with a maximum coverage of $2,000. For $1,200 you get an annual cap of $5,000.
Obviously, this is a way for corporate America to rip off people who flip burgers. Aetna and McDonald’s lacks the managerial ability to bring their profits and overhead to meet international (and soon US federal) standards. Rather than bust a sweat offering insurance that does not rip off workers, they are threatening to stop offering the coverage altogether.
That is to say their will force their employee’s health care entirely on the public at large.
But, says McDonald’s/Aetna, if the law is changed, they will be happy to continue to sell overpriced policies to burger-flippers.
Or, y’know, pissed at the law. Here, you’ve got 85% of people happy with what they’ve got, and then a law gets passed that’s supposed to help these people but really just causes the private sector to desert them.
My company is not in the restaurant business, but we have a very large population of low-paid hourly workers and with very high turnover and we are struggling with the same issues. Our healthcare costs are projected to go up $30-$50 million in the next few years if we can’t figure out a new way to lower insurance costs without passing even more of the increase to our employees.
I know McD’s is a big company and an easy entity to hate, but their goal is not to screw with their employee base. Unless you want to pay $3 for an 85-cent hamburger, something’s gotta give.
So, how do all the other companies in other countries in the world manage this?
McDonalds is surely in many of the countries that have a cap on insurance company overhead. As are many other high turnover professions. How do the manage to do it?
Does *any *company offer free health care to its workers? I’m a salaried employee and my weekly premium costs are comparable to the medium-higher benefit McDonald’s plan. My annual cap is higher, but… I guess I’m not feeling the outrage. I’m frankly amazed that McDonald’s workers have options as good as that.
When I worked for Pizza Hut many years ago, the insurance offered was much worse. I didn’t buy it and neither did any of my co-workers, to my knowledge.
A mini-med plan is a cruel joke. Basically you pay a health insurance company lots of money. In turn they give you a tiny bit of coverage that covers practically nothing should you actually need it.
I was offered one via one the companies I work for. I could pay nearly $400 a month for “health insurance” for our family. In turn I’d get 10k if any of us really got sick with invasive cancer or a heart attack or renal failure. So in return for shelling out nearly $5k per year we’d get a handful of bennies that would cover just about nothing if a member of my family needed to use it.
:rolleyes:
A mini med plan is a costly insurance scam. It is not health insurance.
"The (German) Sickness Funds have one-third of the administrative expenses that are normal in American health insurance. "
in Taiwan,
“The 1994 seemed hopelessly optimistic, when it set a limit of 3.5% for administrative costs … in fact the system has done much better than that … only 2% of costs most years.”
–Both from The Healing of America by T. R. Reid
So if we presume a $1,000 premium for the low-cost plan, and allow mcDonald’s/Aetna a nice 5% for admin costs, we have $950 left. The new rule would require $800 be spent on actual health care, leaving $200 for profit. But Aetna says they cannot manage that so if we assume Aetna can run their business as efficiently as German and Chinese companies we can see their profits are over 20%.
That is to say the policies are (by world standards) a complete ripoff.