It's about time that Wal-Mart addressed lack of health care coverage for its employees.For much of the last decade, the retailing behemoth Wal-Mart Stores has been associated with stingy health care as much as low prices.
Across the country, politicians and labor groups derided the company’s health plans for their high expense and bare-bones coverage. Two states, California and Maryland, even passed laws demanding, in effect, that the company spend more on employee health benefits.
“We want this giant to behave itself,” one Maryland legislator, Anne Healey, said at the time.
The giant, it turns out, was listening. All the criticism was hurting its reputation and its ability to expand. So now, after spending two years seeking advice from everyone from Bill Clinton to executives at Starbucks, Wal-Mart is overhauling its health plans.The company, according to data available for the first time, is offering better coverage to a greater number of workers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, provides insurance to 100,000 more workers than it did just three years ago — and it is now easier for many to sign up for health care at Wal-Mart than at its rival, Target, whose reputation glows in comparison.
Wal-Mart has hardly become a standard-bearer for corporate America: it still insures fewer than half its 1.4 million employees in the United States.
4 comments:
You know I am very proud to be living in what is about, for good or ill, the most developed country that thinks it is ok for its citizens to not have health care.
Really, I feel so damn good about it.
I am ill. Ill. Luckily if I feel ill, I do, for the moment, have health insurance.
You are so right on this but what they do is almost nothing compared as to what needs to be done.
And then, as you rather aptly bring up... sex discrimination and harrassment claims. Where are they on the docket.
I just refuse to go into that store ever, but I drive by all the time and the parking lot is always full.
We have not shopped in a Wal-Mart for five years now and I cold not be happier.
WalMart's pretty scummy, but the solution isn't trying to squeeze some Common Decency out of a corporation which is legally obliged to maximize profits.
Unfortunately, The Masses are buying the Reicht Wing Lie about single-payer health care for all being an Evil Commie Plot. I'll wager that most WalMart employees are opposed to single payer health care.
We need strong leaders to get the truth out. And I'm not sure we have them.
Between rising oil prices on the one hand, and daily stories about toxic Chinese made crap, Wal*Mart has bigger problems on its plate than paying out legal settlements. Couldn't happen to a worse company. I hope the epitaph for this company reads: Greed Kills.
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