A WHOLE NEW WORLD? So this grand new alliance between Wal-Mart and SEIU and AT&T and the CWA and Intel and CAP and all the rest is sure exciting, but I'm not yet excited. What you really have here are a bunch of organizations endorsing the concept of universal health insurance by 2012. The devil, though, is in the details. The insurance SEIU wants may be rather different than what Wal-Mart wants. Wal-Mart, of course, has been a pioneer in forcing employees to pick up high-deductible, high-risk plans. If their idea of universality is to subsidize insufficient coverage, I'm not on board. And, sadly, the announcement says nothing about what that insurance will look like. Nor is there any guarantee that Wal-Mart isn't just grabbing the headlines and the atmospherics: Will their political contributions now go only towards politicians supporting comprehensive health reform? Will their lobbyists fan out in favor of Medicare-for-All? All praise to Andy Stern, who's doing remarkable work getting important players to the table. But the gauzy commitment to universal health coverage has become to easy for folks to get excited over it. Even the insurance industry is on-board with that principle! The question is, at least in a broad sense, how much government involvement they want, how comprehensive they believe the basic care package to be, how many resources they're willing to put into the fight, and whether they'll actively oppose progressive plans. And as of yet, I just don't know the answers. --Ezra Klein
