Wal-Mart to Cut Healthcare Benefits

I was just thinking that what this country needed was MORE corporations treating their employees like expendable garbage:

After trying to mollify its critics in recent years by offering better health care benefits to its employees, Wal-Mart is substantially rolling back coverage for part-time workers and significantly raising premiums for many full-time staff.

Citing rising costs, Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, told its employees this week that all future part-time employees who work less than 24 hours a week on average will no longer qualify for any of the company's health insurance plans.

In addition, any new employees who average 24 hours to 33 hours a week will no longer be able to include a spouse as part of their health care plan, although children can still be covered.

Guess what's another good way of cutting costs? Hire two part-time workers to work 20 hours a week instead of one worker to work 40 hours a week. Then you don't have to pay for any healthcare benefits at all! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!

If this country considered healthcare a right, instead of a privilege, this would not happen. Even if we did not have socialized healthcare, we would have laws that prevent corporate employers from being able to take away workers' benefits because of "rising costs" that cut into their profits.

But we don't consider healthcare a right, and we subscribe to bullshit conservative fiscal ideologies of unfettered capitalism and bootstraps, and believe in fantasies about how the market will solve everything, while simultaneously deregulating the market to the point where workers are dependent on the goodwill of their employers to provide them with healthcare coverage, as if the Invisible Hand is a gentle benefactor and not a greedy fucking thief.

This system could not be more profoundly broken.

This is a big shift from just a few years ago when Wal-Mart expanded coverage for employees and their families after facing criticism because so many of its 1.4 million workers could not afford or did not qualify for coverage — rendering many of them eligible for Medicaid.

Which they now will be again, if austerity measures don't render them ineligible for Medicaid, too.

And conservatives will whinge endlessly about the Welfare Queens who accept government assistance, while diligently ignoring that working people denied full-time positions in order to further deny them benefits are not the problem: The problem is megacorps like Wal-Mart who want taxpayers—including their own exploited employees—to subsidize their outsized profits by providing the care for their employees they are unwilling, and not required, to provide themselves.