Elizabeth New: I-2124 restores choice
By Elizabeth New
When the WA Cares Fund finally begins taking applications from Washingtonians needing long-term care, people might be surprised they’re not eligible. Needing long-term care won’t be enough.
In addition to a medical need for long-term care, most workers who pay 58 cents on every $100 they earn will need to have done so for at least 10 years without a break of five or more years. The realities of childbirth and child care mean that more women than men are likely to lose out.
Applicants also will need to have worked a minimum of 500 hours in each of those years. Workers in a gig economy, those who take time off formal work to care for family members and disabled people working part time, may run afoul of vestment criteria.
As program solvency concerns loom, lawmakers have discussed increasing the 500-hour requirement to 1,000 hours to exclude even more people. A higher tax rate for WA Cares may also be on the table.
That happened with another program. Paid Family and Medical Leave saw a doubling of its tax rate in its short lifetime. It also received a lawmaker bailout of $200 million last year and appears headed for another.
Both PFML and WA Cares take wages from workers for needs they might not have at the expense of needs they do have. These misguided programs have low-income workers paying for the wants and needs of others who have more income, more resources and who are not in need of taxpayer help. We know workers with middle and upper incomes use paid leave from taxpayers far more than workers with low incomes.
Lawmakers have ignored calls to repeal WA Cares. Instead, a state agency is spending millions of dollars promoting a program that is already mandatory, while misleading workers that they can have peace of mind about long-term-care needs when they clearly cannot.
Enter Initiative 2124. Saying “yes” to I-2124 would make participation in WA Cares optional and allow workers who need today’s wages for today’s needs a way out of the program.
Making WA Cares optional also would allow people who do end up needing long-term care more choices about the services and caregivers they find most helpful. The state is crafting rules right now that limit future beneficiaries’ options.
When the Legislature was presented with I-2124 earlier this year, it had the option to pass the measure, send it to the ballot with an alternative or ignore it. It was ignored and no alternative was proposed, even though lawmakers who are supportive of WA Cares admit fixes are needed.
Maybe that’s because WA Cares is beyond fixing.
If WA Cares was meant to help all workers with long-term care, it would be set up that way. It isn’t. This tax collection was set up to help lawmakers afford budget wants in a state where spending has doubled in the past decade. As an added political bonus, the tax strengthens the power of SEIU 775, a caregivers’ union and has taxpayers paying for more caregivers.
Taxpayers do and should offer a safety net to people in financial need of long-term care, but WA Cares is not that safety net. Medicaid is. Lawmakers should reform and protect Medicaid from misuse to lower the state’s costs, rather than administer a backward social program that harms workers’ choices and wages.
If WA Cares was a good idea, the state wouldn’t be spending millions on a marketing campaign selling the program to people who have no choice but to join WA Cares anyway.
I-2124 gives workers a choice the Legislature didn’t.
Elizabeth New (formerly Hovde) directs the Washington Policy Center’s Worker Rights and Health Care centers.