Wal-Mart's health keeps us sick

Wal-Mart's health keeps people sick

Date published: 2/12/2006

MIAMI--Why can't a compa- ny that had a quarter- trillion dollars in sales and earned $10.3 billion in fiscal 2005 provide affordable health coverage for its lowest-paid workers?

If Wal-Mart were a state, it would rank 39th in population, right behind Nebraska--and that doesn't include the dependents of the company's 1.7 million employees.

This company doesn't negotiate discounted prices from suppliers of everything from panties to popcorn; it mandates them. Wal-Mart makes unions tremble and politicians swoon. It could grab a health-insurance provider by the throat, shake it a few times for effect, then swing the sweetest health-care coverage deal in the universe.

But why should it, when it can pass its health-insurance costs to taxpayers?

Maryland made a first bold attempt to put a stop to this cold, corporate calculus last week when it passed a law (over the governor's veto) requiring any company with more than 10,000 employees in the state to spend 8 percent of its payroll on employee health insurance or to pay the difference to the state Medicaid fund to help cover low-income state residents.

Only Wal-Mart meets those parameters.

I'm not a lawyer, but I've been in enough casinos to know where I'd place my money in a contest between Maryland's state attorneys and the legal titans Wal-Mart will throw at them. But at least Maryland's legislators tried.

What a concept--public policy on behalf of the public.

For all of its myriad other real and imagined evils, Wal-Mart isn't the cause of the nation's health-insurance crisis, only the most salient evidence of it. Wal-Mart is doing exactly what profit-driven private corporations will do when we leave what should be public policy in their hands: Maximize return and minimize costs, regardless of who suffers.

Corporations aren't about compassion--they're about market efficiency. We shouldn't condemn a snake for being a snake.

It's a sad accounting for the world's richest nation: 45 million Americans, including 8.4 million children, lacked health-insurance coverage in 2003, according to the National Coalition on Health Care (whose honorary chairmen are former presidents Bush, Carter and Ford).

The coalition projects that the number of uninsured could reach 53.7 million in 2006--an increase of 10 million since President Bush took office in 2001.

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Date published: 2/12/2006