Grocery stores at dawn. Hospital reception desks at midmorning. Hotel front counters at midnight. Across California, seniors in their seventies are still on the job. Social Security alone does not provide a living in this state, so they keep working. Many of them are also on Medi-Cal, because the program’s rules for older Californians are designed to let seniors hold a part-time job and keep their health coverage.
After more than forty years in pastoral ministry, I see these older workers every Sunday. They are members of my church, in their sixties and seventies, still on the job because retirement was never financially possible for them.
I am very concerned about a new tax being proposed in the California Legislature that would tax businesses based on employees who enroll in Medi-Cal. Even if the business offers health care insurance.
This proposal is filled with unintentional consequences. Employers will be discouraged to hire not only seniors but also formerly incarcerated, people who are transitioning from foster care, people with disabilities, and even single parents.
If we just look at seniors, there are more than 1.7 million Californians who are enrolled in both Medicare and Medi-Cal with the majority who are 65 or older, according to the state Department of Health Care Services Federal labor data shows that nearly one in five Americans 65 and older is still working, and AARP research finds that roughly four in 10 of those who work say they need the income. California, according to the state’s own Master Plan for Aging, has the second-highest rate of poverty among older adults in the country.
This is the opposite of what California has been planning. The state’s Master Plan for Aging, released in January 2021 by the California Health and Human Services Agency as the official ten-year strategy for older adults, calls for expanding economic security for seniors, increasing workforce options for older adults, and keeping Californians in their homes as they age. This tax which is being called the “Jobs Tax” works against every one of those goals.
The message to employers is plain: the more older workers, the more workers who have a disability, the more workers who need a second chance, the more you pay.
The proposal also fails on its own design. Employers cannot legally require workers to disclose their Medi-Cal status, nor require them to take employer coverage in its place. The only way for a business to limit its exposure is to avoid hiring the workers most likely to be enrolled.
Older Californians did not arrive at Medi-Cal eligibility through bad choices. They were laid off in their fifties. They raised children. They cared for aging parents. They did the work that holds families together, but it does not build a retirement check. Now, when they need a paycheck to bridge the gap, the proposed tax would disincentive businesses to consider hiring them.
Supporters of the tax argue California needs new revenue to sustain Medi-Cal. That concern is real and deserves an honest answer. But the answer cannot be a tax that makes it more expensive to put a senior or a person who needs an opportunity on the payroll.
Lawmakers should drop the “Jobs Tax” and find a revenue path that does not put older Californians, people coming home after incarceration, foster youth, and people with disabilities at greater risk of being squeezed out of the workforce.
The state should be looking at ways to continue to encourage businesses to hire workers who need an opportunity not creating more barriers like the Jobs Tax. I encourage the Legislature to do the right thing and reject this proposal.
Dwight Earl Williams is a senior senator at the California Senior Legislature.