Rhode Island Law Exposes Big Companies That do Not Provide Health Insurance.

Many of the calls for universal or mandatory affordable health insurance being proposed across the nation insist that large companies provide employees with access to affordable medical coverage, or be held accountable.

Yet a recent article in the Boston Globe stated despite this very provision in Massachusetts's recently enacted mandatory health insurance plan, many businesses are not providing health insurance to their workers, and neither are they paying the required penalties. In light of this another New England State Rhode Island perhaps as a precursor to similar mandatory medical coverage, has passed a law that requires any large business operating within the state to divulge if it has more than 50 employees receiving State medical benefits.

While the state has no immediate plans for passing a universal healthcare bill like that of Massachusetts, currently the law has been passed to find which companies that are intentionally passing the burden of healthcare on to tax payers.

The new law expands earlier legislation that made companies with more than 250 employees that are receiving state health insurance benefits divulge that information. Upon enacting that law it was discovered that some very large and well known companies operating in the State, including; CVS, Bank of America, and Wal-Mart, were not providing affordable health insurance to their employees as they should, forcing many of them onto the public doles.

It is expected that the new bill will reveal many more companies that could be providing affordable health coverage to their employees, but are not paying their fair share. The Law does not affect small businesses.

State Senator Levesque who authored the measure said “Our study so far has shown us largely what we expected, that there are some large corporations in our state that are dropping the ball when it comes to affordable health insurance for their employees. We understand that smaller companies struggle under rising healthcare costs, but large ones can do better. What is happening, essentially, is that they're counting on the government to subsidize them by picking up the tab for insuring their employees."

Levesque hopes that garnering this information will be the first step in finding ways to compel those companies operating in his state that can afford to provide reasonable health benefits to their employees to do so.