Wal-Mart Supports Health Care Reform (No Joke!)

by Tim Foley

categories: Enemies of Reform, National Health Exchange

Published June 30, 2009 @ 03:49PM PT

The sound you just heard was my head exploding.

Today's been a day of surprises.  Al Franken was finally declared the winner of last November's Minnesota Senatorial race.  The National Journal published something nice about Medicare.  The Senate HELP Committee leaked its outline for the public health insurance option, and it looks more like Chuck Schumer's version than what they had floated a month ago.  But the biggest surprise of all is Wal-Mart, the country's largest employer with 2 million employees, coming out in support of the employer mandate.

If you look back at my mini-power analysis of what interest groups were offering to give up what if the public option were to be nixed, I left out big business.  They're not even willing to pretend to concede on their point of concern.  The greatest anathema for the business lobby is unchanged since the Clinton years - they want to avoid any attempt to institute an employer mandate, a.k.a. employer pay-or-play.  The general theory is companies "play" by giving their employees comprehensive benefits or "pay" into a common fund that helps pay for the subsidies given to individuals in a health exchange.  Although small businesses in the 1990s likewise fought like hell against an employer mandate and helped sink reform, these days they are much more likely to be pro-reform (in no small part because the small business insurance market is nearly as stacked against them as the individual market is for individuals).  Groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business continue to see the employer mandate as an existential threat.  They're against the public health insurance option too, don't get me wrong, but they are dead-set against the employer mandate.  Big business won't even pretend to be open to talking about it.

Well now there's one huge exception.

Wal-Mart's decades-long reputation as an innovator in unfair labor practices and "race to the bottom" competitive practices precedes it.  It has also been an ally for the forces of the status quo when state-level employer mandates have popped up from time to time.  So it's startling to see it joining with the progressive think-tank Center for American Progress and labor union SEIU (personal disclaimer below) to proclaim in a letter to the president, "We are for shared responsibility. Not every business can make the same contribution, but everyone must make some contribution. We are for an employer mandate which is fair and broad in its coverage, but any alternative to an employer mandate should not create barriers to hiring entry level employees."

That last sentence is somewhat important in the sense that one of the ways Wal-Mart has increased the number of its workers with some health coverage (and thereby rehabilitated some of its worker-hostile image) these past few years has by increasing the number of its lower-income workers signing up for government programs like Medicaid and SCHIP, or buying skimpy but cheap insurance plans.  But it still doesn't deaden the overall impact.  I'm not expecting Wal-Mart to suddenly become a champion of the employer mandate - it takes a special level of character to say, "You know what, go ahead and tax me - I insist!  No, seriously, I mean it!"  But breaking the monolithic block of Big Business resistance to one of the most common-sense approaches to financing health care while maintaining true shared responsibility is not a small deal.  Clearly the Chamber of Commerce, with a snippy statement denouncing Wal-Mart's move as "[using] the government as a weapon against their competition," takes this defection seriously.  And as Jon Cohn points out, "Remember, there's a huge difference between voting for something all businesses oppose and voting for one that includes among its supporters a huge, iconic corporation."  Do we dare to hope that Wal-Mart won't be the only corporation to embrace reform?  Might companies like Starbucks or Google, likewise eager to project a general warm and fuzzy worker-friendly vibe, soon follow?

Employer pay-or-play had faded from the debate, sufficient that many - included me - began to worry that it was on the chopping block.  With the element of surprise, it's now back on the agenda in a big way.

(Note:  Igor Wolsky has more on the employer mandate and Wal-Mart's support of a trigger mechanism to reduce costs.  Check him out.)

(Disclaimer:  although I work for a local of SEIU, I had no knowledge of this event beyond what I read after the fact in news accounts.  The views expressed are entirely my own, and do not reflect any employer, past or present.)

(Photo credit:  code poet on Flickr.)