Wal-Mart's capitulation endangers American health care

Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott is leading his company down a most dangerous path by allying with its union critics to endorse government-run universal health care. Last week, Scott teamed up with Andrew Stern of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of Wal-Mart's harshest critics, to launch the "Better Health Care Together" campaign. This campaign seeks to co-opt business leaders to join unions and liberal advocacy groups to press for universal health care by 2012. Other members of the Better Health Care Together campaign include the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, AT&T and other corporations.

Scott and Stern listed four "common-sense principles" that would guide the coalition in "achieving a new American health care system." One of these principles stated: "We believe every person in America must have quality, affordable health insurance coverage." No one advanced any specific plan or policy prescription to achieve that goal. However, the statements by the union bosses make quite clear that they understand universal health care to be a government-run, taxpayer-financed system in which Americans' most basic health care choices will be dictated by bureaucrats.

Stern said, "I think (the) employer-based health care system is dead." CWA President Larry Cohen added, "It's long past time to move health care -- a public good -- from the corporate balance sheet to the public balance sheet." Far from taking issue with these sweeping endorsements of socialized medicine, Scott vowed that Wal-Mart will "put aside disagreements" with its union critics so business, labor and government can "work together" to solve the health care crisis. This capitulation to the unions is just the latest example of Wal-Mart caving into its liberal critics in a desperate and futile bid to buy political peace.

For a couple of years now, Wal-Mart has been kowtowing to the environmental movement. The company is spending $500 million a year to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to combat the unproven global warming threat. Not content with that, Wal-Mart is pressuring its 60,000 suppliers to cut their emissions and adhere to other onerous environmental mandates or risk losing their lucrative contracts with the retailer.

What does Wal-Mart have to show for toeing the green agenda? Absolutely nothing. The environmental movement, to a large extent, still rejects Wal-Mart. Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth continue to denounce the company's environmental strategy as insufficient or a sham. Yet, Lee Scott somehow believes that by appeasing unions -- Wal-Mart's most implacable enemy on the left -- the company can silence its labor critics. Scott is simply deluded.

Stern may be willing to share a podium with Scott to push his cherished goal of taxpayer-financed health care, but he is not going to stop his anti-Wal-Mart campaign until every Wal-Mart employee is a dues-paying union member.

And it certainly doesn't bode well for the success of Scott's union outreach effort when his endorsement of universal health care was immediately met with scorn by the labor movement. Paul Blank of WakeUpWalMart.com, which is funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said Wal-Mart's commitment to health care cannot be taken seriously until it gives universal coverage to its own workers and stops giving political contributions to pro-free market, Republican politicians.

Scott's endorsement of universal health care is bad for Wal-Mart, bad for its customers and bad for its shareholders. Ultimately, the cost of any government-run universal health care system will be borne by the taxpayers. And those taxes will come right out of the wallets of the moderate-income workers that are Wal-Mart's customer base.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

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