On Saturday 11 February 2006 8:57, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > How can people > working for Walmart have so little income that they qualify for Medicaid? > Even at min wage? > > I'm not being a smart a$$ - I don;t understand how this works. And if > Walmart is doing this, are all businesses doing the same when they pay min > wage? Or do some pay min wage but provide health insurance for those > employees?
OK, imagine you are a woman with 2 kids. Your husband left you, or died, or is in military service overseas. You work at Walmart for $7.50 an hour, but they keep you at just under 32 hours per week so they don't have to offer you health insurance or other benefits. How would you be doing, financially? Do you think you might be under the poverty level? Would it be dicey even paying rent and utilities and providing food and clothes for your two children? Even if you had worked at Walmart for the previous two years and qualified for their "health benefits" you surely wouldn't be able to kick two hundred bucks per month or more back to Walmart to pay your share of the cost of those benefits. Consider also that when qualifying for Medicaid, eligible medical expenses over the past six months can be subtracted from your income for the purposes of determining financial eligibility. This is known as the Medicaid spenddown. All businesses do not do this. Walmart is, for a corporation their size, arguably the worst. But because of their very size and the downward pressure they can exert on other businesses, they may well be compelling other businesses to cut benefits in order to compete with them. Lee Lee
