Those good things I said about the Wal-Mart health plan? Still operative. Only one small problem. Wal-Mart has decided to stop hiring sick or old people in order to keep the costs down, and stop hiring full-timers in order to lower the percentage of the workforce receiving benefits. That means every position in the store will now include some degree of taxing physical labor (so old folks would have to take carts in), folks seeking jobs will be consigned to part-time hell, and so forth. Steve Greenhouse of The New York Times got the memo and wrote a terrific piece on it. I'm currently creating an annotated guide to the memo itself. It really lays bare the rapacious, profit-driven attitude of the company and articulates, if inadvertently, why employer-based health care is insane. Stay tuned.
