-The Wal-Mart fair share campaign doesn't make any effort to link its -demand with single-payer health care. Far from it, it's pitched as a -way to reinforce the idea of employment-based health care, even while -it is being phased out of practice by corporations and governments.
The point is to stop the phaseout at such corporations. The New York bill would bring such phaseout to a complete halt for all employers covered.
And remember these bills have a "pay or play" structure; employer pay the benefit of pay the equivalent tax to a state fund to cover all the uninsured. These bills create a structure of a tax to fund single payer over time. Money for a single payer plan has to come from somewhere and most of them are structured as a payroll tax not much different.
-Moreover, mandating high-turn-over employers like Wal-Mart to devote -a slightly higher proportion of labor costs to health care -- which -will buy crappier coverage at ever higher costs as time goes by -- -hardly benefits even Wal-Mart employees.
The New York bills all index the benefit levels to inflation.
And tell me why a single payer initiative pushed at the state level won't go down in flames like the 1994 California initiative did? That campaign was a real one, spending $3.2 million with lots of support from major unions in the state.
Part of my view on incrementalism is from working on that campaign. That was a real effort in a year when focus on health care reform was at the top of the agenda and the voters wouldn't swallow massive reform of health care in one gulp. What evidence do you have that this reality has changed?
Nathan Newman