“Offer insurance”? Oh, the fact it costs more that 50% of your pay each month, in my mind, disqualifies that as an “offer” and puts it into PR territory. It’s like spending a dollar a week on lottery tickets ($52 dollars a year) and telling me you’re offering me “up to” several million dollars in retirement.

Chambers of commerce generally represent small local independent businesses, and these are precisely the enterprises most likely to be adversely affected by the change Walmart is nowadvocating.

This positioning by Walmart is being interpreted by useful progressives in the traditional context of partisan stereotypes. And that’s a shame, because there’s more to it than that.

I think that provision of healthcare by employers is now finally showing itself to be a serious part of the problem, in the sense that it is a primary source of inequities in the system. Employer provision leads to group members bargaining for lower cost while those who are not group members pay a higher rate. And it makes losing a job even worse, because your health and your family’s health may also be threatened.

Companies that operate here in America and employ Americans should be expected to compensate employees in a way that allows them to have health insurance, or they ought to be expected to kick in for a share of healthcare’s cost based on the number of employees they have. BUt it doesn’t really help anyone when businesses’ costs for insurance are ever-growing but not fully recognized by employees.

The problems with healthcare were for some time out of sight and thus out of the minds of many American workers. What is making everyone so grumpy now is that this ugly subterranean beast has grown to such behemoth size that we are now all being forced to recognize it and all of its perverse unwieldiness.

I shopped at Walmart yesterday. They aren’t evil. They just are. An efficient market that keeps prices low, which is a benefit to all of us as consumers.

Have you ever heard the term “rent-seeking”? This is a prime example. Wal-mart is wealthy. We know that Wal-mart loves to put smaller competitors out of business. We also know that while Wal-mart can afford to provide all their employees with health care, many of their competitors will not be able to.

Therefore, Wal-mart is using the government to put its competitors out of business.

Something no one else has mentioned, WalMart is also in the process of installing walk in clinics in most of their stores. By making insurance mandatory, this will add traffic (including their employees) – & profits _ to their bottom line. And they can still do their best to derail other parts of HC reform they don’t like.

I was never one to think Wal-Mart was evil, and so I think it’s entirely possible that they are supporting this because they think it is the right thing to do. But you can’t ignore the possibility that this could help Wal-Mart destroy their competition even further, and that could be exactly why Wal-Mart is supporting it.

I agree with Jimmy. Health care and employment should have nothing to do with each other, for this reason as well as the lack of incentives to improve health that don’t exist in a pooled plan.

This is precisely why we need to decouple health care from employment. A small business retailer is not going to be able to keep costs low and, at the same time, provide high minimum wages and health insurance to its unskilled workers. Wal Mart wins again.

Those evil conservatives at the Chamber of Commerce! Why won’t they see the beneficence of Wal-Mart executives, the way Justin does?

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That said, I despise going to wal-mart now that I can afford to shop elsewhere. But I am serious and single payer healthcare and am glad to see one juggernaut get behind any sort of employer required health insurance.

Frankly, the chamber of commerce fighting this pretty much breaks down like it did for me 2 decades ago. Small businesses, which I’m sure were part of the Chamber of Commerce offered me dick for insurance. The big “evil” company came in and sold shit cheap enough for working people to be able to afford it and offered me insurance.

DW