On Tue, 27 Mar 2007, Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Yorker was quoted:
> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/02/070402fa_fact_goldberg?printable=true
> [E]arlier this year Lee Scott joined Andy Stern, th leader of the Service
> Employees International Union, in a coalition of businesses and unions
> calling for quality healt care to be made available to all Americans by
> 2012. Stern, whose union pays for the activities of a group called
> Wal-Mart Watch, which regularly criticizes the company, told me he did not
> believe that he had been co-opted by Wal-Mart but his allies in the labor
> movement weren't so sure. "Anyone who wants to take health-care lessons
> from Wal-Mart, Chris Kofinis, of Wake Up Wal-Mart, said, "needs to have a
> serious reality check." Government-sponsored universal health coverage
> would, of course, free Wal-Mart and other companies of the burden of
> providing health insurance for their employees
This last sentence misses the soul of the issue. Everyone is now for universal health care except dinosaurs. The new dividing line is between people who are really for it -- who are for single payer -- and people who are embracing a new Rube Goldberg system that will exhaust and kill the impulse like Magaziner/Hillary did in 1993 (viz. the recent Massachusetts and Schwarzennegger plans, which make great liberal-seeming headlines, but can't possibly work economically because they don't make the savings that you can only make with single payer, and which will fade out in a few years and be forgotten just like their Massachusetts forebear was).
Wal-Mart and Stern are in the latter camp, deadset against single payer. IF ONLY they were both really for universal health care -- the millennium would have come.
The irony of that last sentence is that what all-non-single payer plans have in common that they *wouldn't* free Wal-mart from the burden of providing health care -- they would increase it (because you can't provide less than they presently are). So clearly they can't be intending this plan to work.
Michael