NEW YORK, Jan. 18 (UPI) -- The other day a top Starbucks executive told me that very soon the cost of healthcare for Starbucks employees would exceed the cost of the coffee in a Starbucks purchase.
Given the implications for the future price of a double mocha with an extra shot of vanilla, he got my attention.
But what was really the news here? Everyone knows that America's healthcare bills are rising. Since 2000 they have been increasing at about three times the rate of inflation.
The Detroit automakers have been telling us for some time that the cost of employee health insurance contributes more to the price of a new car than the steel it is made of. Last year Ford, General Motors and several bankrupt airlines made headlines demanding that their workers pay a greater percentage of the company's health-insurance bill.
No, what is new at Starbucks and the rest of these businesses is not the high cost of healthcare but the move to position it as a cost of production.
The companies want us to notice that, what they spend on health insurance, we end up paying for when we buy their goods. A consumer society, they warn us, must be on guard against precipitous increases in manufacturing costs, which can stress the family budget.
This is not an un-useful thing to know. If the need to do something about healthcare costs and healthcare availability is to be driven home with every cup of coffee, I am not opposed.
Nor am I opposed to the implicit self-promotion. Let's appreciate Starbucks, the automakers and comparable companies for offering workers good health benefits. As I understand it, every Starbucks employee is eligible for medical, dental and vision care insurance after three months on the job and if he or she works as few as 20 hours a week.
The president of the company enjoys the same health benefits as the greenest barristas, I'm told.
I would be happy to see words on every Starbucks cup, right next to where it says that this drink is extremely hot, telling me that the drink I am about to consume is provided by a company that offers its workers decent health coverage.
Just as a movement is afoot to let customers know that a company is "environment-friendly," why not let us know that a company is friendly to its employees as well? Why not tell us that good benefits cost as much as good coffee beans?
In fact, while we are at it, I'd like to know how much the cost of advertising and promotion contribute to the price of my medicines, and how much of my cable bill goes to executive compensation, and what percentage of Wal-mart employees are being paid a living wage.
But in the meantime, it is true that companies with good healthcare plans pay an increasingly steep price for them. It also is becoming more and more irrational to expect companies that provide health insurance to compete with those that do not.
The companies that are complaining about these things may have nothing more in mind than finding a way to reduce their obligations to their workers, but if their complaints make more citizens take notice of the problem, we could all benefit from the commotion.
After all, only the most unreconstructed conservatives will advocate reduced health benefits for all as a way of resolving the discrepancies in the wage bills of different companies.
The rest of the country is more likely to support measures such as those introduced in 30 states that would require large companies to compensate the state if they don't offer health insurance to workers.
Such fees would compensate the rest of us who ultimately pay the price of health care for these workers through public hospitals and Medicaid. Down the road, these state efforts may lead to broader support for healthcare reform to keep costs down and to extend coverage to everyone.
And the companies are likely to follow suit. The pressure on their bottom lines, like the pressure of healthcare costs on consumer prices, leads in only one direction.
At this juncture, one cannot predict whether a reformed U.S. health system will resemble the more efficient "single payer" model, or instead will rely on the broad if more costly mix of insurance providers we currently use.
But there is little question that Starbucks, the automakers, and others, as signaled by their complaints about healthcare as a cost of production, are becoming allies in the decades-long struggle for national health insurance.
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(Michael Lipsky is Senior Program Director of Demos, a public policy organization based in New York, and a visiting professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. He is the author of many journal articles and several books, including Protest in City Politics (1970), the prize-winning Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service (1980) and, more recently, Nonprofits for Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting (1993, with S.R. Smith).)
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(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
