While everyone else is debating the availability of health care and trying to engage in a heated, national debate, Apple is out there doing something to try to help fix the problem. Rather than getting embroiled in Washington politics or taking sides, they’ve decided to extend full-benefit medical insurance to their part-time employees beginning in 2010.
Currently, medical insurance is only offered to full-time Apple employees. This includes employees of Apple’s retail stores. Currently, however, many of the employees at Apple’s retail stores are part-time employees. Some of those work as few as 15 hours a week. The new plan would offer medical insurance even to those employees.
To be eligible to sign up for this benefit, an employee has to have been with Apple for at least a year. It is estimated that Apple has more than 16,000 retail employees, of which nearly 10,000 are part time employees. Some estimates suggest that this move will cost Apple around $80 million per year or more.
This change is in response, at least in part, to dissatisfaction among part time Apple employees. Apple surveyed the employees, to see what they could do to increase satisfaction. Improved benefits was a repeated response, and medical insurance hit the top of the list as to which benefits employees would like to see.
Currently, Apple pays around 65 percent of the health coverage costs of their employees, and it is expected that this percentage will remain the same for its part time employees. On average, companies in the United States pay around 73 percent of the costs of medical insurance for those companies that do offer medical insurance benefits.
The good news for Apple seems to be that the $80 million price tag is a drop in the bucket, especially when you put that figure into the context of the Apple stores, where most of the part-timers are. The Apple stores will have had around $6.5 billion in sales in 2009, with about $1.4 billion in profits. Taken in context, the cost of the insurance to Apple is less than six percent of their profits.
