Evil Empire: Walmart and health care, Republican priorities

If you have an anti-Walmart fetish, as I do, this is a fun editorial.

Health care policies are another example of their mutually distorted priorities that are hurting the American nation. Wal-Mart covers less than half the company’s workers in their health care program. The program is not very comprehensive and is very expensive to the individual employee. Taxpayers are often picking up the bill for these uninsured or underinsured Wal-Mart workers because the show up in emergency rooms without the ability to pay the emergency care bills. This health care issue contributes to rising health care costs for all consumers and other employers who do provide good employee health care benefits! A recent PBS program on Wal-Mart had an elected official in California revealing that Wal-Mart workers use 40 percent more in taxpayer provided government services than employees of other similar businesses.

How many studies are going to show that people w/o insurance cost our country a lot more a) because they receive less preventative care, which is a lot cheaper than treating the consequences of this lack of care, and b) because the ER becomes their primary care facility, which is a hell of alot more expensive than going to a doctor that a patient has an established relationship with. There's a lot our country could be doing without resorting to a socialized, national health care system to make people fitter, happier, more productive. Giving seniors a drug card (it'd be nice and all, if the damn thing actually benefitted seniors instead of the pharm companies) is a nice gesture, but until we start dumping cash (and giving corporate incentives to dump cash--tax breaks!!!) into reasonable, rudimentary preventative primary care, our system is going to go closer and closer to the brink.

Thanks, Wal-Mart. By Jingo, Buy America!