WA Cares is not a good answer for people in need

Proponents of WA Cares are misleading the public. They say without the state-imposed, long-term care program, millions of people will lose a taxpayer-financed benefit.  

No Washingtonian has a benefit to lose right now, and no one can guarantee they’ll have a benefit from WA Cares in the future. Unknown life circumstances and many hurdles sit between Washington state workers and a benefit promised only to some.  

For starters, not everyone will need long-term care. Numbers show as many as 70% of us in our graying population will use the services someday, but those estimates also mean that 30% of us won’t. Next, even when Washingtonians do need long-term care, they won’t always qualify for a WA Cares benefit, regardless of how much they have paid into the fund.

Health-related eligibility requirements are more strict than a national standard for needing long-term care if a person has private long-term-care insurance. A vestment criterion also requires most workers to pay this tax for 10 years without a break of five or more years. That will hurt some family caregivers WA Cares is supposed to be helping. Many people take breaks away from formal work to raise kids or offer care to aging parents.  

Those who do end up qualifying for the $36,500 lifetime benefit the state is dangling already know — or will find out — that the amount is inadequate to cover most people’s needs, and the state is in charge of decisions about how benefits are spent. 

Something we can guarantee is that most W-2 workers are seeing smaller paychecks thanks to a payroll tax of 58 cents on every $100 of their earnings, and many could be spending or investing those earnings on life needs they do have. A worker making the state’s average annual income in 2022 of $84,167, according to the Employment Security Department, pays $488 dollars a year toward WA Cares. 

 Worse than not getting a return on a forced WA Cares investment, the new payroll tax will often have low-income workers funding the long-term care services used by others with higher incomes, resources, savings or investments. WA Cares is no safety net for people in need. We already have one of those: Medicaid. 

Washingtonians are generous but not when we know our generosity won’t work. WA Cares will not get us out of a long-term care funding crisis, and it is already harming individual and family budgets. 

Always unpopular 

WA Cares has never had strong support from Washingtonians. It also has had solvency concerns from the beginning. 

In 2019, nearly 63% of voters said the Legislature should repeal the long-term-care law it passed. The legislative body ignored voters’ non-blessing in Advisory Vote 20 and instead started spending millions of dollars on the unwanted program. In addition to administrative costs, a state agency has been marketing WA Cares, trying to create an affinity for the program. Promoting a product people have no choice but to buy is unnecessary and wasteful. 

 Other state agencies and an oversight commission have been busy trying to ensure financial solvency for WA Cares. (The marketing campaign doesn’t mention the solvency concerns.)  

Voters rejected a 2020 constitutional amendment lawmakers were counting on to give WA Cares a financial boost. In a post-election analysis, Washington state Actuary Matt Smith said, “In today’s dollars, the program is expected to require an additional $15 billion of revenue to cover the next 75 years of benefits and expenses.” 

A newer actuarial analysis of WA Cares shows solvency is still concerning. Offering portability to workers who continue paying taxes from out of state until reaching eligibility, although welcome, could make solvency harder to achieve. Lawmakers and others are discussing the possibility of raising the WA Cares tax rate higher or increasing the number of hours worked in a year to count toward eligibility. More money in, less money out is the name of the game. 

Proponents of WA Cares insist we shouldn’t have to deplete our savings and investments before relying on other taxpayers to finance our needs. That’s exactly how it should work. The good news is that analysis shows many people have untapped resources to pay for long-term care and that it would not consume their life savings. 

 WA Cares offers false hope, cost-shifts some of the Medicaid budget to both low-income and high-income workers and is expected to help SEIU 775, a union that wants more taxpayer-funded caregivers and their union affiliation. WA Cares isn’t primarily about helping all Washingtonians fund long-term care, and it won’t. It isn’t even set up to do so.