Every day I look at the insanity surrounding this debate and despair that we will ever have a sane and fair healthcare system.

No, no—it’s a perfect plan. Because we do tend to have 100% employment of decent people in this country, especially during a recession. I mean, anyone who doesn’t have an employer, well, they’re just lazy. And lazy people deserve to be punished. With death, or at least poorly managed illness and untreated injury. Is that a fair restatement of Walmart’s stance?

But from what I understand, Wal-mart finagles hours and keeps people nominally part-time while actually working full-time.  So I fail to see how they benefit, given that their cheap asses are trying to fund the Walton Family Bunker for the End Times.

When will somebody just stand up and say that healtcare is part of Life, Liberty and Happiness in the dang Preamble and make it a fucking mandatory thing that any DECENT government would strive to provide for its constituents.

Speedbudget - Wal-Mart can afford to pay for healthcare for its employees for a few years.  A significant number of other retailers have business models predicated on not doing so - and would suffer a lot more than Wal-Mart from such a requirement.

Simply put, Wal-Mart has the resources to bear a burden that would (and will) put competitors out of business.

The real question is why SEIU is letting themselves get played like this.  An employer mandate is one of the worst possible ways to achieve universal health insurance, forcing everyone into the current terrible private health insurance system through employers, which is like curing your polio by going around smacking other kids in the knees with hammers.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the union, either. It makes sense from Wal-Mart’s POV, because one of the hidden purposes of a multi-payer system is to bind employees to their company and restrict mobility of labour. I suppose you could take an extremely cynical view that a big incumbent union like SEIU might want to see this broken system continue, but it seems like it could backfire on them (in fact, at one time I recall seeing some sort of on-line ad campaign against Stern by dissident union members).

“Simply put, Wal-Mart has the resources to bear a burden that would (and will) put competitors out of business.”

This is TOTALLY their gameplan and it would never ever be otherwise. Wal-Mart doesn’t do ANYTHING unless there is a benefit to them.

Wal-Mart is positioning itself to be the nation’s foremost primary care provider in the next few years. They’ve been moving their pharmacy model into a more clinical model and they want to make sure that they get a honey deal, whether its for single player or the public option. This isn’t about THEM, this is about EVERYONE ELSE. And when employers are mandated to get insurance, then the cheap Wal-Mart plan for basic services (but nothing else) will look pretty attractive. And if they can roll their own employees into their own health plan, then they can control costs better. Why pay an insurance company $600/month per employee to have the care they need denied anyway, when you can bill yourself internally only $200/month and deny the care yourself?

Also, there will still have to be a minimum number of hours that the employees will have to work to be eligible for Health Care. Wal-Mart is sitting pretty: People are desperate for work right now, so they can just cut back their employees’ hours to just shy of that minimum and then hire a bunch more people to work that minimum - 2 hours a week and not actually have to pay for the health plan for any of their own employees.

I’m not a huge fan of SEIU, but they are pretty damn cagey, esp. on national policy issues.  I can’t see them getting outmaneuvered by Walmart, at least not so transparently. 

SEIU probably still supports single-payer, like all the other unions, but they’re pragmatists.  They’re probably grasping at something they believe is doable.  Just what that is, however, isn’t clear.

I’ll wager whatever is really going on is still hidden from view.

Mighty Ponygirl’s theory is as good as anything else I’ve heard.  It’s possible SEIU is working on a neutrality deal with Walmart as a quid pro quo for assisting Walmart become uber primary care provider.

That seems fairly unlikely to me, but there’ve been stranger bedfellows in the labor movement.  I suppose anything is possible.

I think it’s something of a moot point.  The Democrats in the Obama camp are championing Public Option as their plan of choice.  The Republicans have released a haphazard array of non-plan tax cuts and tax credits to make the existing health care more affordable to the diminishing middle classes.  This idea of mandated health insurance is generally heckled by both sides.  Only a handful of middle grounder southern Dems and northern Republicans seem interested in it.  Where is this plan’s support supposed to be coming from?

At the very least, it seems like an insurance mandate would necessitate a public option before it could take off.  Because no one but Walmart would want to be forced into bed with the insurance giants, knowing that rates are going to keep going up 10-20% a year.

I mean, there is one thought - Walmart thinks it can do to health care what it did to the supply-side of the retail system.  Namely, using millions of people on its rolls to bully around insurance companies and health care providers into providing cheaper coverage.

The fucked up thing is is that single payer is actually pro-business (well everyone but the health insurance industry) as well as pro-worker. I don’t get why big businesses don’t pressure Republicans more to get universal coverage. It would be a boon to the employers as much as the employees.

First, excellent info from Ponygirl. Thanks for that.

I think it’s something of a moot point.  The Democrats in the Obama camp are championing Public Option as their plan of choice.

Now it’s a question of getting those Democrats who are in the insurance industry’s pocket to champion it:

Lawrence Lessig’s new anti-corruption organization Change Congress recently used online ads to shame Sen. Ben Nelson in his home state for opposing President Obama’s public health insurance option while taking $2 million from the health and insurance interests that are leading the fight against it. And it worked. After an 11-day public fight, Nelson switched from calling the public option “a deal breaker” to saying he is open to it and promising not to join Republicans in a filibuster against it.

[via boingboing]

The next target is Mary Landrieu, who they tried to buy for $1.6 million. The campaign to fund the Louisiana TV ad is here.

Heck, even my.barackobama.com has had to go begging for funds on this issue. It’s absolutely shameful that Democratic organisations have to fight against their own party members on such a basic issue.

Franken’s in the Senate now, so there are no more bloody excuses about GOP filibuster—it’s old news that the Republicans are creatures of the private insurance industry, so it’s time to take a very close look at the Senate Democrats.

The fucked up thing is is that single payer is actually pro-business (well everyone but the health insurance industry) as well as pro-worker. I don’t get why big businesses don’t pressure Republicans more to get universal coverage.

Mainly because of the pro-worker side. When you’re terrified of losing your company-provided group health plan, you’re more likely to embrace the corporate suck. Also, from the point of view of American business culture, keep in mind that one of the few concrete justifications for the existence of large corporate HR departments is benefits management (which is more properly the territory of the CFO office)—take that away and people start questioning why these pettifogging drones and cheerleaders are really needed.

Single-payer is pro-entrepreneurial business, but not really pro-big business.

The SEIU serves Andy Stern, not its members. The SEIU is less democratic than the Teamsters, and is just as corrupt. When people talk badly about unions, the SEIU is the modern reason why.

Gracchus—

GM isn’t big business? They wouldn’t be in half the trouble they’re in if we had single payer.

GM isn’t big business? They wouldn’t be in half the trouble they’re in if we had single payer.

They’re in the trouble they are now because they are big businesses. You were asking why big businesses don’t pressure Republicans to get universal single payer coverage, not about the potential benefits that their executives are blind to due to greed, incompetence, and devotion to the Human Resources Culture.

As we’ve heard in the post-mortems, GM’s executive management could have done a lot of things over the past 15 years to reduce the impact of the economic downturn—fast-track development of hybrids, emphasise on fuel efficiency, tighten up product lines, focus on car manufacturing instead of car loans, etc., etc. And yet none of these internal decisions (that required very little government lobbying) were taken, due to the sitution I described above—a very American business situation that’s not restricted to the executive suites of automakers.

SEIU probably still supports single-payer, like all the other unions

exceptAFSCMEmutherfuckinggrumblegritzeflfaratsing…

The SEIU is less democratic than the Teamsters, and is just as corrupt.

This is OT, but I can’t let msnr’s statement pass without comment.

I don’t know if mnsr meant it this way, but I assume he is talking about SEIU and IBT at the international level, i.e. their highest governance structures.  I have no direct knowledge of corruption amongst those bodies.  For all I know, msnr may be right.

I do know about their locals, however, and they are as varied as they can be.  There are some few that are corrupt, certainly, but there are many, many that are not.  Those few that I know intimately are absolutely squeaky clean honest.

Bear in mind that unions are very highly regulated, esp union elections.  Much more regulated than any state or federal election.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

MP, not that I’m saying you’re necessarily wrong about it, but given Wal-Mart’s demands for an employer mandate, including a ratcheting down of the mandate if costs don’t decrease and the death of free-rider provisions, it’s pretty obvious that the main point of their involvement is to force costs on other employers while removing Wal-Mart’s costs for pushing its own employees onto Medicaid. 

Wal-Mart may want to get into providing minimum-cost and coverage health insurance, but there’s a lot more money in just pushing competitors out of business altogether.  Would you rather make $200/month off of the few retail employees that would need to be pushed onto minimum-coverage health care, or increase your bottom line by millions or even billions through pushing major retailers out of business by increasing their employment costs?

How many other large retailers don’t offer health insurance?  It seems like some of those retailers are unionized, and I would presume that those unions would have exacted some degree of health coverage in the past.  Theoretically, this could hurt small retailers, especially mom-and-pop stores (the few that still exist), but an employer mandated plan would likely leave out small businesses, just as FMLA doesn’t apply to companies that have fewer than 50 employees.

Jesse—I think it’s both/and. They can drive the smaller competition out of business and the competition that stays in business will be buying their product.

SEIU is also one of the only non-health care industry groups involved with Healthy Economy Now, which is putting out those really vague commercials on “another way to fix health care”.  Check out the other companies involved; not exactly a who’s who of single-payer advocates.

Here’s the thing with the kind of employer mandate that would drive all of Walmart’s competitors out of business in 5-10 years: All of those competitors make political contributions. All of their managers vote. Most of them have deep roots in the communities where they have stores.

So if Stern can get Walmart to defuse the opposition to employer mandate enough this time around that something actually gets into law, suddenly every chamber of commerce in the country is going to have a desperate interest in making that employer mandate cheap or free to fulfill. Which means a serious public option or even regional single-payer. They’ll have to do it to survive.

Of course, why GM and the other big businesses didn’t get on this wagon years ago: yes, they really were that stupid. These were the same people who didn’t see Japanese cars coming to 25 years, didn’t think you should invite the mechanics or the machine operators to the plant-design meetings, so why the eff would they see universal health coverage as a way to get out from under their cost structure? Add a good dose of class warfare, and bingo.

Maybe the SEIU sees value in driving a wedge between Wal-Mart and the rest of the Chamber of Commerce.  In the future, when Wal-Mart wants the help of the rest of the COC, they may not be as willing to give it.

In any case, I thought the question was whether employers will be required to contribute to the cost of health care or not - the Chamber of Commerce had been opposed on principle, but now their most powerful member is supportive, at least in theory.  So what did the SEIU lose here?  They wanted employers to contribute, now Wal-Mart agrees, so how did they get played?

From what I understand, Andrew Stern’s whole strategy is to develop the SEIU by making it more appealing to employers.  Which, uh, you know, defeats the purpose of having a union, but he doesn’t seem to get that.

ah wal-mart: your source for cheap plastic crap. I don’t know about you guys, but i feel kinda dirty and traiterous by shopping at wal-mart. the sad thing is, being unemployed now since January there are few times when I can afford to shop somewhere else, and I just hate feeding those life sucking bastards. I recommend watching the documentary “Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Prices”; it may not be entirely unbiased (it’s been a while), but it gives you an insight to their mentality and their modus operandi.

Simply put, Wal-Mart has the resources to bear a burden that would (and will) put competitors out of business.

So? Am I supposed to think that keeping the local HyVee open is more important than expanding health care access? Suppose you’re right, and my local mom-and-pop 200,000 sq ft superstore does wind up closing or replaced by a Wal-Mart - now all those basically-full-time-but-considered-part-time stockers and checkers now have health insurance.