Wal-Mart executives also state that the company offers excellent healthcare coverage because the company the company pays for catastrophic incidents and there is no lifetime limit (Dicker 84). While all insured people would want this kind of coverage in their policies, it is not the kind of coverage needed most of the time by the majority of people. Most of us need coverage to help pay for pre-natal care and childbirth, the occasional broken arm, and raising children who continually come home from school with the latest flu virus. Wal-Mart insures only 48% of its employees, in contrast to 62% that other employers do (Clark 2). On average Wal-Mart employees pay 42% of their premiums, versus 16% at other employers. A report prepared by the Committee on Education and the Workforce of the House of Representatives showed that a single worker could end up spending around $6400 out-of-pocket - about 45% of her annual salary - before seeing a single benefit from the health plan." Even if they elect to buy the insurance there is a six-month waiting period for eligibility (Dicker 83). So many opt out, and guess who foots the bill for all those uninsured Wal-Mart employees? We do. In California alone the healhcare costs picked up by the state for Wal-Mart workers is $32 million per year (Karjanen 155). Roll that out across the country and we're talking billions of healthcare subsidies for Wal-Mart every single year.
A frequent argument that local governments use when selling their consituents on the idea of bringing Wal-Mart to town is that Wal-Mart creates jobs. This is true. In the U.S. alone Wal-Mart creates over 100,000 jobs per year. That is an impressive number until one digs a little deeper into the effect those new jobs have on other jobs. A study, by University of Pennsylvania economist Edward Shils, has determined that for every job created by Wal-Mart there is a loss of 1.5 jobs in the community, which nets out to a loss of .5 jobs (Karjanen 153). The taxpayers again subsidize Wal-Mart by picking up the unemployment costs that shift to them for all those people that lost their jobs.
To be continued...
Think About It
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