One of the things I didn't get to blog about last week was the whole Wal-Mart / health care / evil memo leak. Nathan Newman has a nice piece at the TPM Cafe about why we need to keep holding companies like Wal-Mart's feet to the fire about health care. Here's a snippet:
The more large corporations like Wal-Mart are attacked by the public for their health care policies, the more those companies will have an incentive to push for national health care to relieve the pressure on them. But bash government, and those companies are happy to see attention diverted from them.More fundamentally, such an approach assumes that better government bureaucrats are all that are needed to get a better policy, but the reality is that better health care in other countries is dependent on both better policies and stronger worker power to hold their companies accountable. Yes, some of the irrational incentives in the system can be eliminated, but unless the employer role is completely eliminated -- which hasn't happened except in a few countries -- then holding companies accoutable will always be critical.
He is very right.
I've seen firsthand how small employers will not hire employees or resort to contractors becasue of the difficulty and cost of offering decent health insurance. Other companies turn to employee leasing -- which is not a bad solution but doesn't address the root problem. The way things work these days it's going to take the clout of major employers like GM, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, etc to lean hard on the government before we'll get (dare I say it?) a real single-payer, non-employer based healthcare system for Americans.
