Health Care For All?

So I hit the Starbucks near my office this afternoon, and ran across this, posted near the door:

I almost fell over, narrowly missing the destruction of my precious cup of coffee. The sign was just so weird, in so many ways, that I didn’t know what to think. My first reaction was, “oh, wow, that’s pretty cool”, but that rapidly degenerated into cynicism when I remembered that the state of healthcare access in this country is so abysmal that objectively inadequate coverage can still be above average.

I checked out Starbucks’s website, and discovered the following:

-All employees working 20 hours a week or more are eligible for benefits.
-Employees are offered a choice of up to five health plans, depending on location. These plans vary in cost and benefits, but all cover hospitalization, office visits, lab and x-rays, emergency care and prescription drugs.
-The coverage includes basic, preventive, and major dental services, as well as orthodontia.
-Eye exams, lenses, frames, and contacts are also covered.
-Mental Health and Chemical Dependency treatment is covered.

On the surface, these benefits look really good. However:

-What are the deductibles?
-How many days of hospitalization are covered? How many doctor visits? Etc…
-How much do the insurance providers micromanage care? Do employees have to go through a ream of paperwork to get procedures approved?

Most importantly:

-Starbucks does not cover the entire premium. They pay 62-80% of the cost of each employee’s coverage, depending on how expensive the plan is.

This point is crucial, because it is what makes a lot of people “opt” out of health coverage. Before moving to the Bay Area, I worked at Champaign County Health Care Consumers, a grassroots, non-profit organization that works for health care justice. I coordinated their hotline, which takes calls from people having problems with the health care system. I spoke to a lot of people who were offered insurance by employers paying none or only part of the premium. For a person working a low-paying (or even mid-paying) job, whether to have money taken out is of her paycheck for health insurance is a difficult decision. Many people just roll the dice, so to speak, and hope they don’t get sick.

I realize that benefits are part of an employee’s total salary/wage package, and it all evens out to the same amount in the end. However, this number should be proportional to the amount the company can invest in its employees (or “human resources”). When a large, very profitable corporation publicly claims to offer good health coverage, all the variables should be scrutinized. Decent benefits are useless when offered to an employee that can’t afford them, and “affordable” is relative to how much money you’ve got to start with. According to starbucksunion.org, Starbucks baristas are making around $7-9/hour throughout the country. In Oakland, that’s barely enough to rent a cardboard box to live in, let alone take anything out for health coverage. I asked an employee at the Starbucks displaying the sign how much insurance costs her, and she said about 10% of each paycheck. The bottom line: a lot of people can’t afford that.

It’s great that Starbucks is pushing the idea that everyone should have access to health care. Their benefits are a lot better than other corporations’, and I applaud that. However, I’m not turning cartwheels thinking that the money I turn over for my daily cup of coffee is sponsoring a company that has actually achieved worker justice. Starbucks, along with all of the other insanely rich corporations out there, can still do a whole lot better. Until we have a decent national healthcare system, I’m not going to settle for “better than average”.

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