This is an important point on why it's so tough to get businesses onto the universal health care bandwagon:
Partly, ideology gets in the way. “You couldn't have done more to pay off corporate America than they did with the Clinton plan, but in the end, companies turned on it because it was viewed as a big government plan,” said Drew E. Altman, the president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “They are market people and corporate people. That is how they look at the world.” That very much includes General Motors, despite all its health care problems.
These are country club people. They know each other. They believe similar things. And to break faith with the overall ideology just because your company can't compete is, for many of them, unthinkable. Executives, sadly, are still individuals, and they think like themselves, not like the dispassionate, aggregate brain of a corporate entity. And then there's the other problem:
Partly, though, it is just plain hard to figure out what to do. “Nobody has any simple answers,” said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, whose members include more than half of the Fortune 100. Different companies, she added, have different needs and problems: what might help General Motors would not necessarily be what Wal-Mart and its employees needed.
It's not what Wal-Mart needs, it's what Wal-Mart wants. As a relatively new company that employed a paradigm-shifting attitude towards labor costs (make them dirt cheap), their paltry benefits put them at a competitive advantage. Their competitors, who created their compensation packages in a different spirit and, often, during a more generous period, can't roll take away what they've already given. So Wal-Mart doesn't want a system in which everyone has decent health care because the current system is good for Wal-Mart's business. A system where they couldn't compete by offering their workers the worst possible health care of the major retailers would, conversely, be bad for Wal-Mart, as it would take away the comparative savings they extract through meager compensation strategies. Which reminds me of this great Sam Walton quote I came across recently:
“the more you share your profits with the associates—whether it's in salaries or incentives or bonuses or stock discounts—the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers. And if the associates treat the customers well, the customers will return again and again, and that is where the real profit in this business lies”
Ah, to be proved wrong by your own company...
