• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Key Senator May Block Wal-Mart Health Care Bill

Posted on: Thursday, 9 February 2006, 00:00 CST

By JENNIFER BUNDY

A bill that would require Wal-Mart to pay more for its employees' health care costs may not get through the Senate because the chairman of a key committee said he opposes it.

Senate Labor Chairman Mike Oliverio said he does not plan to allow his committee to discuss either the pending bill or a companion measure if it passes the House.

The Senate bill would have to go through Oliverio's committee and then two other Senate committees before reaching a vote in the Senate. The House bill is pending in the House Health and Human Resources Committee and also would have to go through the House Finance Committee.

"I view the 50 legislatures as 50 laboratories of democracy. Right now this experiment is percolating in one of those laboratories, in Maryland," said Oliverio, D-Monongalia. "For now I think we should just watch what is going on there and maybe learn something that would be helpful in our state."

The West Virginia Fair Share Health Care Act mirrors a measure enacted in Maryland last month. Lawmakers there overrode a veto by Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich, having passed the bill in April. The law there takes effect in January 2007.

The bill would require any employer with 10,000 or more workers in West Virginia to spend at least 8 percent of its wages for health care costs. Those that don't must pay the difference to the state's Medicaid insurance program for the poor.

With 12,054 employees at 35 locations across the state, including four Sam's Clubs, only Wal-Mart appears to fall under the bill's provisions. The bill does not mention Wal-Mart, the state's largest private employer, or any employer by name.

Oliverio said the bill is "fraught with all kinds of issues that would need to be addressed."

Those issues include "the arbitrary numbers of employees and percentages of dollars that have to be spent on health care, what role the government has on imposing those kinds of limitations on the private sector," Oliverio said.

House Health and Human Resources Chairman Don Perdue said he is not ready to declare the bill dead. His committee discussed the bill once and hopes to get back to it once it finishes work on Gov. Joe Manchin's health care proposals.

"The only way an issue gets to a level of being dead is if you look at it, work on it and see if it has life," said Perdue, D- Wayne. "Right now I can't say it doesn't have any life."

"This is bill is bad public policy and won't improve access to health care coverage or control the soaring costs of health care in West Virginia," said Kelly Hobbs, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart in Washington, D.C.

"Not only will these bills fail to address health care issues they will cost jobs and slow economic growth."

Source: Charleston Daily Mail

More News in this Category