Amazon has had more employees enrolled in Medicaid than any other company in Nevada every single year since 2020. The company's official response, when asked about this, was to suggest Congress raise the minimum wage. The same Congress currently controlled by the party that just passed a law kicking millions of people off Medicaid entirely.
Nearly a Trillion Dollars and Counting
Let's set the scene. The joint federal-state Medicaid program cost nearly $932 billion in 2024, according to CBS News. That is not a typo. Nine hundred and thirty-two billion dollars to provide healthcare to low-income and disabled Americans, a number that keeps climbing while large profitable corporations quietly let their workers collect the benefit instead of offering them affordable coverage themselves.
Now the Trump administration, with Dr. Oz running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has decided the problem is fraud by blue states and lazy workers who need to prove they're employed 80 hours a month just to keep their insurance. The actual corporate behavior driving enrollment? Not the focus. Not even close.
Amazon and Walmart: Regulars on the List
Here are the facts as CBS News reports them. In Nevada, Amazon has employed more Medicaid-enrolled workers than any other company every year since 2020. For state fiscal year 2025, that came to 4,914 Amazon employees on Medicaid. Walmart was second with 3,503. The Clark County School District, the state government itself, and Tesla rounded out the top five.
Amazon's spokesperson Alisa Carroll told CBS News the company pays workers more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, and that Medicaid eligibility depends on household size and income, not just individual wages. Carroll then said, and this is a direct quote: 'Pointing fingers at Amazon over Medicaid is a red herring. What really needs to happen is a significant and large increase in the federal minimum wage.' That would be the federal minimum wage set by Congress. The Republican Congress. The one that just passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to boot people off Medicaid. Cool plan, Alisa.
Walmart's spokesperson Katrina Proffitt told CBS News the company offers affordable medical coverage to eligible employees including part-time workers, with no-cost virtual care options available. Both companies have argued, when their names appeared on these lists in the past, that part-time and seasonal workers inflated the numbers. Nevada updated its methodology. The numbers are now full-time only. Amazon still tops the list.
States Fighting Back With Transparency Laws
California is trying to revive an expired law that would require the state to publicly identify any company employing 100 or more people with workers enrolled in Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid program. Nevada has had a similar law since 2017. Oregon tried and failed this year when its legislative session ended in March without passing one.
California state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, the bill's author, framed it simply to CBS News: 'It's a basic principle that taxpayers deserve transparency about which large employers are shifting their healthcare costs onto the public.' That is a remarkably restrained way to describe what is, in practice, some of the most profitable companies on earth offloading their employee healthcare bills onto the federal government while paying their lobbyists to fight minimum wage increases.
New Jersey went a step further. Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a bill in June that actually fines businesses. Companies with 50 to 249 workers on Medicaid pay $325 per person per year. Companies with 500 or more enrolled workers pay $725. As penalties go, this will sting a company like Amazon roughly the way a mosquito stings a blue whale, but it is something. Washington state and Colorado tried similar bills this year. Both failed.
The Work Requirement Trap
Here is where this gets genuinely cruel. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the GOP tax-and-spending law just passed by Congress, requires non-disabled Medicaid enrollees between 19 and 64 to prove they are working, volunteering, or in school at least 80 hours a month or lose their coverage. States have until January to enforce it. Nebraska and Montana have already begun.
The Congressional Budget Office projects this will increase the number of uninsured Americans by more than 5 million by 2034. That is not a projection from a liberal think tank. That is the CBO. And according to KFF, more than half of adult Medicaid enrollees without dependent children already meet the 80-hour threshold or face circumstances that would likely qualify them for an exemption.
Georgetown University research professor Edwin Park put the bind plainly to CBS News: 'There's a whole set of people who are working, they may not satisfy the work requirement provisions, they may not get the exemption that they're qualified for, and they don't have access to that employer-sponsored insurance either.' So they work. They lose Medicaid for paperwork reasons. Their employer doesn't cover them. They end up uninsured. This is the system working as designed.
California's Bigger Fight Coming
California has nearly 14 million residents on Medi-Cal. Close to 5 million of them, according to CBS News, will be subject to the new federal work requirements. Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento have been trying to find a way to make large employers actually pay for their workers' healthcare rather than dumping the cost on the state. They struck a deal with Gov. Gavin Newsom to explore tax options, though any actual increase would fall to the next governor.
Newsom, who CBS News notes is contemplating a presidential run as he finishes his final year, is in the awkward position of needing to look tough on corporate cost-shifting while not wanting to hand Republicans a 'California is raising taxes again' attack ad before the 2028 primary season even starts. Good luck threading that needle, Governor.
The Dingo Take
Let's just say the quiet part out loud. America has a publicly subsidized healthcare underclass that makes the business model of its largest employers significantly more profitable. Amazon clears well over $500 billion in annual revenue. It has topped Nevada's corporate Medicaid list for five consecutive years. Its official response is that Congress should raise the minimum wage, knowing full well that the Congress currently in power would sooner set the Capitol on fire than vote to raise the federal minimum wage. This is not a misunderstanding. This is a strategy.
The naming-and-shaming approach states are reaching for is better than nothing, but not by much. Nevada has published this list since 2017. Amazon has led it every year. Nothing changed. New Jersey's fines are so small relative to corporate scale that they will be categorized as a rounding error in quarterly earnings calls. The only thing that would actually move the needle is a penalty large enough to make employer-sponsored coverage cheaper than the alternative. Nobody in a position to pass that is interested in doing so.
Meanwhile, millions of actual human beings are about to lose health insurance because they couldn't document 80 hours of work to a government bureaucracy while holding down jobs at companies too profitable to cover them. Dr. Oz is running the agency overseeing this. The same man who spent decades selling you supplements on television is now deciding who gets healthcare in America. If you are looking for a single image that captures where we are as a country, that one is available.
