Walmart and Health Care
My reaction to Walmart has been like a lot of you: disgust. They have a corporate policy that deliberately squeezes their workers so that profits are kept high. But why do we presume that companies have an obligation to pay for health care? Why not the government? After all the government is the cheapest health care provider in America because it spreads its costs over such a large base, and has no expensive bureaucracy trying to weed out high risk patients. Health care in this country is so expensive precisely because it is privatized and consequently fragmented and focused on organizing and reducing risks to insurance companies.?
Walmart is doing us a huge favor by pointing out that society at large is a better provider than they are. Plus, if we de-couple the health care debate from Walmart we can focus instead on living wage issues by encouraging people to shop elsewhere.
Also, it’s a little ironic that this holiday season Walmart is doing well because low wage earners are flocking to it to save money and thus pay for their higher heating bills! We are all going to lose the working person vote if we keep shooting at the store they feel is the best deal in town for prices. It is an easy tactic for a populist right winger to criticize leftist elitists who don’t even have to shop at Walmart. Compare that with the relative complexity of building the left wing argument that, somehow, those low prices are a bad thing — even for people who don’t work at Walmart.
That’s why while I dislike the bare bones, and what I think is unethical, nature of Walmart’s strategy I use them as an example of why business should not be responsible for health care [rather than waste time trying to make them, responsible]. There must be an increasing number of business executives who would agree with the need for a debate about publicly, rather than privately, funded health care. They are drowning in benefit costs [think GM], and would love nothing more than to see the country as a whole step up and take on the job they are failing at.
By the way: in a perverse way the accounting profession, hardly a bastion of liberal thinking, is going to help us: upcoming accounting standard changes will force companies to recognize on the underfunding of benefits their balance sheets. The red ink will scare even more executives our way if we are sensible about the way we cooperate with them.
