$637 million. That's how much the state of Massachusetts paid last year to provide insurance to poorly compensated employees of large corporations. The deal, of course, is not quite so explicit as that. Dunkin Donuts -- the worst offender -- does not subcontract out with the government to push care towards employees. Rather, it 1) doesn't give its employees affordable health care options and 2) pays employees little enough that they qualify for state plans meant to help low income residents. Voila! State steps in! And Dunkin Donuts is, in effect, subsidized. And compared to other states, Massachusetts has it easy. Nationally, about 60 percent of large employers offer health insurance. In Massachusetts, that number is 72 percent. So they're dealing with less cost shifting than other states, but still paying out the better part of a billion a year. What's galling about this dynamic is not, as some would have it, the sheer unfairness of large, rich companies tacitly relying on the government to care for their workers. I'd happily embrace a world in which all large, rich companies did that. Rather, this space between all workers receiving insurance from employers and all workers receiving insurance from the government is the worst of both worlds, and riddled with perverse consequences -- namely, it creates a competitive advantage for companies willing to screw over their workers.
