Steve Greenhouse and Michael Barbaro report:
In a confidential, internal Web site for Wal-Mart’s managers, the company’s chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., seemed to have a rare, unscripted moment when one manager asked him why “the largest company on the planet cannot offer some type of medical retirement benefits?”
Mr. Scott first argues that the cost of such benefits would leave Wal-Mart at a competitive disadvantage but then, clearly annoyed, he suggests that the store manager is disloyal and should consider quitting.
Um, why is it okay to expect taxpayers to pay for Wal-Mart employees’ health benefits, but not Wal-Mart?
Oh wait. They do offer health coverage. Let’s see. If you make $8 and hour, you’re making something like $16,000 a year. Once you’ve been at least three months—assuming they don’t park your ass one hour a week under the benefits ceiling—Wal-Mart’s family health coverage will run you around $1700. Then there’s the $1000 deductible.
A living wage here in Atlanta comes out to something like $10.50 an hour, so working at Wal-Mart puts you around $5000 behind what it actually takes to feed and house a small family. Then another $2700 out of pocket before Wal-Mart will not pay for your kid’s measles vaccine.
That’s right. Wal-Mart’s health coverage won’t cover your kid’s innoculations. Or flu shots.
Sound unworkable? Georgia’s PeachCare program supports one Wal-Mart child for every four Wal-Mart employees. That compares to an average of one child per twenty-two employees at similar Georgia retailers. So, no, not really working at all. And we’re all paying it with our taxes, so Wal-Mart can offer it’s low prices.
Let’s just call it the Wal-Mart tax. But prices are falling every day!
Is the assumption here that did these people not work at Walmart, they would be highly paid CPA’s, easily able to afford health coverage?
Because my guess is that the people who work in Walmart stores don’t have marketable skills and would likely be getting medicaid anyway.
I certainly haven’t seen a study that suggests that enrollment in medicaid goes up when Walmart comes to town. I’m pretty sure that if such a study were to exist, Paul Krugman would have told us by now.
CC
It is not WalMart’s responsibility to provide health coverage for its employees, it is the employees responsibility. The problem exists in the medicaid program. We should scrap it altoghether.
I like the Medicaid program. I’m happy to pay for it. But I don’t see the point in blaming a place that hires poor people with the fact that poor people tend to have few marketable skills.
A quick google search on the subject will show you that the employers with the largest number of employees on medicaid are always big box stores, grocery stores, staffing agencies and other places that hire lots of unskilled people.
There are a lot of reasons that unskilled people in general can’t afford health coverage without medicaid. Walmart isn’t on the list.
CC
CC,
I have at least two (probably closer to ten if I were in touch with all my many cousins) family members who work at Wal-Mart. Both have some college education short of a degree. No, my uncle and my aunt would not be highly paid CPAs, but they do have marketable skills. Skills that Wal-Mart is purchasing right now.
The AJC article I linked to shows that PeachCare (Georgia’s version of Medicaid and the like) is disprortionately given to Wal-Mart employees, as compared to similar retailers. Which is to say, I am paying for their health care because Wal-Mart will not, whether Paul Krugman knows about it or not.
Dave,
Your libertarianism and my social democrat leanings aren’t going to mesh, so we’ll have to agree to disagree on whose responsibility health care coverage is.
But we have a de facto employment-based health system in the US today. And it isn’t working for my aunt or my uncle. And it didn’t work for me either growing up—I didn’t have health insurance for more than a full year total until I was in seminary and was required by law to purchase it alongside tuition—which meant I went some years without consistent treatment for a chronic health condition. Again, we can argue (fruitlessly) over whose responsibility this is. But I am quite certain that I deserve health care, and that my uncle and aunt do too.
Medicare is quite efficent, much more efficient than private health insurance systems. It isn’t as well-to-do as a PPO plan, for instance, but it took care of my four grandparents quite well. For what it does, it works very well.
I wish we could all opt into Medicare/caid somehow, and then supplement it with additional insurance plans if we wish. I’d sign up in a heartbeat.
CC,
As long as we have a de facto employment-based insurance system, large employers are (ethically) responsible for providing health coverage. Without it, my wife would be dead. What this has to do with education, poverty, and other class-ish issues, I don’t know. Wal-Mart could provide real insurance coverage tomorrow if it chose to. Many other retailers do. But it would rather sell the poor for a pair of shoes.
Forgot the NYT link in the first sentence! doh!
If it cost Walmart more money to offer better insurance, and they past that cost along to the customers would anybody notice? I’m not sure. I probably wouldn’t, but I’m not a penny-pincher.
As CP points out chutney, you are going to be paying for WalMart’s employee’s medical coverage one way or another. Either in the taxes you pay to medicare or the price you pay on WalMart’s goods. The “benefit” of having the medical costs covered through medicare versus a WalMart plan is that the cost of the coverage is split amongst all Americans in a medicare plan but only to those that shop at WalMart stores under an employer plan. I’ve got no clue how the cost difference would breakdown. As a consumer to WalMart, I would rather pay the lower prices… on the other hand, as a Libertarian, I would rather pay less taxes… basically, for me, it’s a wash.