Employers Pocket Medicare Money, Cut Employee Benefits

[Omaha Steve]

Full article: http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/08/08/employers-pocket-medicare-money-cut-employee-benefits/

Corporate Greed

Aug 8

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Employers Pocket Medicare Money, Cut Employee Benefits

In a sophisticated version of the street corner “three-card monte” hustle, many employers are taking government money that was supposed to be used for retiree health care and putting it in their corporate pockets.

In the monte scam, the dealer shows you one card—say the queen of spades—and puts it face down on the table with two other cards. You bet your money that you can find the queen after he’s shuffled the cards around a few times. Of course, you never can get the right card, and he gets to keep your money.

So while employers are crying about health care costs, many of them are taking taxpayer money that was clearly marked to help pay for retiree health plans and shifting it around to cushion their bottom lines instead and leaving workers and retirees empty-handed.

The Labor Research Association (LRA) looked at several corporate surveys and found widespread use of subsidies provided under the Medicare Modernization Act and the final Medicare Part D regulations released in January 2005 for large employers to discourage them from eliminating private prescription coverage for retired workers. At the same time, a huge majority of the private-sector employers surveyed by the global business consultant Watson Wyatt Worldwide are planning to cut their retiree medical plans for current and future retirees over the next five years.

As of last year, only one-third of employers offered retiree health coverage for their current employees, down from about two-thirds in 1988, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports.

More than nine in 10 of U.S. employers plan to shift more of the burden for health care to employees in the next five years. Ninety-five percent of the companies in the Watson Wyatt survey plan to place additional restrictions on their health care benefits for future retirees over the next five years, such as increasing employee contributions or tightening eligibility for care.

[NVMojo]

1. Why does everything Bush works on have a "corporate kickback" in it?

Duh ....