Have you noticed that Universal Health Care is the new hot thing for businesses to promote? Well, if you ever doubted the validity of these plans, if you ever doubted whether these plans would be better for the employer or for the employee, you need look no further.

Businesses, unions call for universal healthcare by 2012

By Bloomberg News | February 8, 2007

NEW YORK -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc., AT&T Inc., Intel Corp., and Kelly Services Inc. joined forces with two labor unions in calling for an overhaul of the US healthcare system that would guarantee universal coverage by 2012.

"We need to change the current system and we need to start now," Wal-Mart chief executive H. Lee Scott said yesterday at a news conference in Washington. "Business shouldn't have to pay a disproportionate share of healthcare costs."

Members of the alliance want the current system, in which most Americans rely on their employers for healthcare coverage, replaced by an undefined system paid for by the federal government, businesses, and workers.

Wal-Mart wants you to pay for their employees health care, which is funny because, well, you already pay for it.

"So here's how it works: Wal-Mart offers insurance, but aggressively shifts the cost onto its employees. The low-wage workers then pass up the unaffordable coverage and turn to the states. If this isn't exactly company policy, it is at least company philosophy. CEO Lee Scott, at the company's recent ''summit'' for the media, even described it. He said some state health programs are 'so lucrative that, in fact, it's hard to be competitive with them and certainly extraordinarily expensive to be competitive with them.'"
Editorial, Miami Herald 6/11/05

And, not just their employees, but the families of those employees as well.

A snapshot of Georgia's program for uninsured children shows that it's packed with kids of Wal-Mart employees. A state survey found 10,261 of the 166,000 children covered by Georgia's PeachCare for Kids health insurance in September 2002 had a parent working for Wal-Mart Stores. That's about 14 times the number for next highest employer: Publix, with 734.

Wal-Mart is the state's largest private employer. But when the top four companies on the list are measured by number of PeachCare children per the number of employees in Georgia, Wal -Mart still dominates.

Is this really what we want, a plan put together by the unions and Wal-Mart to cover employees by an undefined system paid for by the federal government, businesses, and workers? Hell yes.

After all, what is single-payer health care and GOOD universal health care after all? It is a federal government plan that is paid for by taxes and taxes come from? Income taxes, which come from businesses and workers.

The problem is that Wal-Mart is involved. We can't trust Wal-Mart, they have proven as much. But, listen, what is good for Wal-Mart must be good for the country, right? Well, Wal-Mart uses and supports single-payer so maybe we should support them in this quest.

Don't trust them as far as you can throw them, but use their insistence on federal support to push for a good single-payer system.