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Wal-Mart Makes for Big Health Care Target

Posted on: Wednesday, 25 January 2006, 00:00 CST

By Ed Peeks

It was bound to happen sooner or later in West Virginia and across the country in the growling climate of concern for health care.

Wal-Mart has become a lightning rod for affordable heath-care insurance for uninsured workers in the country. The world's biggest retailer and West Virginia's biggest private employer confronts the forces of state lawmakers, labor unions and other organized groups for health protection.

West Virginia legislators, like their fellow lawmakers in Maryland, aim to get the job done. They don't name Wal-Mart in their respective bills, but the language covers the giant and all others of size.

The West Virginia Fair Share Health Care Act calls for employers with 10,000 or more workers to put 8 percent of wages into employee health care. Employers are told to either do that or pay the difference to Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor.

Wal-Mart says that three-fourths of its workers in the country have some health coverage. Moreover, both full-time and part-time workers are eligible for coverage as low as $23 a month, the company says.

It strikes me that Wal-Mart is lead target for health-care improvements after a recent proposal by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott to raise the federal minimum wage - the twin to health care in the world of work.

The minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour since 1997. Ardent advocates for a raise, like Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., it would seem, have a strong ally in Scott. Proposals for a raise range from $1.10 an hour to $2 an hour.

Scott said the current minimum wage isn't good for business, as Wal-Mart sales reflect at the end of the month. Nor is it good for health care by most accounts.

Gov. Joe Manchin has proposed, separate and apart from the drive for the uninsured worker, community clinics to provide check-ups and basic health care at low monthly fees.

In addition, Manchin seeks for the state a public-private program for basic primary and preventive care at premiums as low as $99 a month. Some lawmakers want to add coverage for specialist treatment and hospital costs.

I say the governor and lawmakers have taken a sure step toward universal coverage with private insurers - that as opposed to national health insurance for everybody and paid for out of general revenue. Nearly 300,000 adult West Virginians are uninsured, according to health studies.

Some opponents of national health insurance, to be sure, also oppose the move to require Wal-Mart and other big employers to enlarge affordable health care for workers.

I heard magazine publisher Steve Forbes knocking the idea the other evening on Fox News. He said the threshold of 10,000 employees would be lowered until the program became like those in Europe. "That's socialism," said Forbes, a former Republican presidential candidate.

Anyway, that prospect doesn't seem to faze the AFL-CIO and allies. They have targeted 30 states in the drive to get legislatures to pattern after Maryland and West Virginia.

Peeks is a former business/labor editor of the Gazette.

Source: Charleston Gazette, The

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