The Wal-Fare State
Who pays for the health care of Wal-Mart's employees? We do, writes Reed Abelson in The New York Times:
A survey by Georgia officials found that more than 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees were in the state's health program for children at an annual cost of nearly $10 million to taxpayers. A North Carolina hospital found that 31 percent of 1,900 patients who described themselves as Wal-Mart employees were on Medicaid, while an additional 16 percent had no insurance at all.And backers of a measure that will be on California's ballot tomorrow, which would force big employers like Wal-Mart to either provide affordable health insurance to their workers or pay into a state insurance pool, say Wal-Mart employees without company insurance are costing California's state health care programs an estimated $32 million a year.
While I'm against forcing employers to cover employees, I'm even more against forcing the public to cover employees because employers pay such a low wage. Especially when the employers are already getting major handouts from the public. (To go to the PDF about the handouts, click the link under the word "tax dollars.")