October 08, 2014
At some point when we are growing up most of us discover that people don’t always tell the truth. Apparently, some folks at the NYT have not learned this lesson.
In an article reporting on Walmart’s decision to stop providing health insurance for 30,000 part-time workers, the NYT told readers:
“In scaling back coverage for part-time employees, Walmart joins retailers including Home Depot, Target and Trader Joe’s, which have dropped benefits in response to the Affordable Care Act, the health care overhaul enacted by the Obama administration.”
Actually, the NYT doesn’t know that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the reason these retailers cut their health care coverage. Retailers have been cutting health care coverage, along with wages and other benefits, for more than a quarter century. While the ACA may have been a factor in these recent benefit cuts, it is entirely possible that these stores would have cut health coverage even if the ACA had never passed. That would be the case even if the companies may have told the NYT that the ACA was the reason they were ending coverage.
Addendum:
I should mention that in standard economic theory, payments for health care are seen as coming out of wages. This means that if Walmart is cutting its health care because workers can now get access to insurance through Medicaid or the exchanges, we should expect to see a roughly equal increase in their wages. On the other hand, if Walmart is just cutting benefits with no increase in wages, this is in effect just a cut in pay. Since the piece makes no reference to any planned pay increases, it sounds like the latter.
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