Maryland OKs Wal-Mart Health Care Bill.

Lately (read: the last two weeks) our Republican governor has been announcing all kinds of new money for education programs here in Maryland. Most people who know the Idiot King know that I don’t care much for our current Governor; those people should also understand that I held the last Governor, a Democrat who probably broke records for graft and mismanagement, somewhere below contempt. You could probably say I hate the player and the game. It’s not lost on me that the previous administration left a mess in their wake, and the current Gov had to clean it up before he could start spending money again.

However, the current Gov vetoed the so-called “Wal-Mart Bill” last year, a bit of legislation designed to force companies with more than 10,000 employees to take on at least 8% of healthcare costs for those people they employ. Predictably, Wal-Mart is upset about this; predictably the other large companies in Maryland are upset about this too. And, predictably, our Governor is upset, because he got the shit lobbied out of him, and put himself firmly in the corner of Big Business. (I’ll pause here to link to this page, which shows Wal-mart’s profit sheet for the last year. Those are billions with a capital “B”, by the way.) So pardon me if I don’t give a shit about Wal-Mart crying in its coffee this morning. Am I going to be upset if the cost of cat litter at the Sam’s Club goes up by a penny? No. Economies of scale for a company as large as Wal-Mart mean that I’ll probably never see more than a 5 or 10-cent increase in the cost of my goods, even if most other states follow Maryland’s lead and implement a similar bill—which, I’d guess, is going to happen in blue states but not red ones. (Full disclosure: We shop at Sam’s Club but not Wal-Mart; if there was a Costco or BJ’s closer to us, I’d switch.)

“We also find that 7% of the children of employees of large retailers are uninsured, compared to 19% reported by Wal-Mart. While 46% of the children of Wal-Mart workers are either uninsured or on Medicaid/SCHIP, the comparable figure for children of all large retail workers is 29%. Wal-Mart workers are less likely than workers in all large retail to have job based coverage (48% compared to 54%). Wal-Mart workers’ enrollment in Medicaid nationally is similar to large retail as a whole.” Source

As a self-employed individual who is shopping for health insurance to prepare for (hopefully) a family in the near future, I can testify here and to Congress just how fucking expensive it is to insure oneself. I can only imagine how hard it must be for a Wal-Mart employee, most of whom aren’t making much above the Federal poverty level (FYI, in 2004 it’s $18,850 for a family of four). Am I sad that large companies in this state are being forced to offer the minimum in health care benefits? No. I’d wager that most of these companies offer plans that are fair and comprehensive anyway. I have a problem with the huge ones, who are muscling their way into every community across the land and closing down smaller stores who most likely offered better benefits.

I am happy, though, that somebody realizes how difficult it is to keep up with the rising costs of living here in the middle class. And I’m happy my state is making a stand.