The Department of Labor and Regulation released results of its latest Employee Benefits Survey yesterday. Among other highlights, 50% of firms responding to the survey offer their workers individual health insurance, and 43% will cover workers’ families:
South Dakota is behind national averages on some key points above.
While 50% of South Dakota employers offer health coverage of some sort, 57% of all firms nationwide do. (That national percentage is down from 66% in 1999.)
While South Dakota employers offering coverage pick up 76% of individual health premiums, the nationwide average employer share of individual coverage is 83%.
The South Dakota gap on family coverage is larger: South Dakota’s covering employers pay 53% of family premiums, while nationally that average is 73%.
Perhaps correlated if not causated with South Dakota’s lower percentages in employer health coverage is our lower rate of union representation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in private industry, 94% of union workers have access to employer health coverage, while only 66% of non-union workers can get health benefits. In 2017, 11.9% of American workers were represented by unions; in South Dakota, unions represented only 6.7%.
Hey, Governor Noem! Maybe stronger unions could be the Next Big Thing for improving quality of life for South Dakota’s working class.
94% of union workers have access to employer health coverage, while only 66% of non-union workers can get health benefits.
Would you leave South Dakota for a union job?
“The U.S. General Accounting Office and Congressional Budget Office have come to the same conclusion, and the far-superior financial ledgers of single-payer programs in other countries show it, too. Even the conservative Mercatus Center study in 2018, initially trumpeted as showing the high price for Medicare for All, was revealed to conclude it would save $2 trillion compared to our current system.”
It’s true. Health care for all is more affordable than this suffering and dying we’ve got now. It works out better on the balance sheets too. That’s a fact.
https://goo.gl/R7uZu8
I wouldn’t, Porter, but we can’t make policy on the basis of individual anecdotes. Statistically, more people will leave South Dakota for better pay and better health coverage than come here for whatever magic prairie pixie dust and bunker-mentality resentment Kristi Noem offers them.