After a front-page Wall Street Journal story and a quote in today’s Washington Post, NRF’s Neil Trautwein appeared this morning on CNBC to talk about a letter that Wal-Mart sent to President Obama supporting the idea of employer mandates for health care. Trautwein said NRF was “flabbergasted” by Wal-Mart’s decision to support employer mandates.
What do you think about Wal-Mart’s support of employer mandates for health care coverage?
6 Comments
Neil did not do a great job in answering the questions fired at him. Be better prepared with a story. The announcers put Neil in an uncomfortable position.
I’ll take Steve O’s comments as constructive criticism. I’m always my own worst critic, anyway. It’s tough in that interview structure (I was in a small room filled with bright lights, looking at a camera lens with voices in my ear) to get our story clearly out. But, I think I established that employer mandates are bad for employers and that NRF strongly favors reasonable reform without employer mandates. I’ll take that as a victory – moral or otherwise!
Wal-mart acknowledges that in reality if a large society demands some form of health care available even for those who cannot afford it – and especially if we think “all” deserve catastrophic and life-extending care (certainly the level of this remains a debate but clearly a very large part of the public remains unhappy with lesser coverage for people with lesser money) – that the costs will be distributed throughout everyone, that we cannot provide something for nothing, and that everyone in the end has to pay. Businesses are part of “everyone,” particularly large businesses which dominate their sectors and have done so in some large part through government blessing of big businesses over the past couple hundred years at the expense of moderate-small businesses. The fact that societies (including and especially the US) have put large subsidies and protective measures over time to encourage a robust big business segment means we have invested – as a society, i.e., from the government, even (and especially, even) in pre-New Deal days – an awful lot of the public’s money into these businesses and set up the conditions we now have where these large businesses control vast resources.
In consideration of all this, I find it sad that larger businesses are willing to say “well, every person should just be forced to pay for it”, entirely supportive of individual mandates on the consumers they live to serve, Especially in consideration that business taxes, if they are enforced for this purpose, will ultimately get redistributed back to the public, whether via lesser jobs or higher prices. The notion that mandates are okay for individuals but not for businesses is a twisted and sad one which simply begs for socialism of the individuals while allowing for corporations to be blessed and privileged by the state.
If our society demands a social-ist solution, which it seems to be, then large businesses with large resources and in a relatively protected tax position will necessarily need to be chipping in substantially (just study personal versus corporate tax burdens from 1950 to today and you’ll see individuals have been far more put upon by the sprawling post-New-Deal nanny state than businesses as government has sought to increase revenue and services). After all, our “capitalist” era saw the redistribution of much of our wealth to the larger business segment.
I would posit that health care should not be a nationally-driven program in the US and do not believe in half of what the public wants, so I’m not even in favor in general of where we’re headed. But that is irrelevant in consideratoin of the fact we are headed there.
I am most greatly concerned with, in any solution I’ve seen that Congress is likely to adopt, the lack of dealing with the escalating prices of health care and the lack of acknowledgement that by any normal equation if we insure more people and help more people pay for more health care, then of course health care prices would go up even more, forcing a spiral no society can ultimately sustain. In America this will especially be an issue as a large segment of people expect a higher quality of health care than elsewhere, so there will continue to be a “fuel” for escalating prices without either major societal behavioral change and/or a real reworking of how goods and services are exchanged/funded/controlled.
Brief PS – while I may have sounded critical of the decision in the early and ongoing history of the US to protect and subsidize business, I am not, or at least not per se. It has had its negative sides (essential monopolization being a chief one), but the movement of resources to larger businesses put those into a state where they could be more quickly and efficiently built upon given large business can transform wealth into a lot more wealth much more quickly than other segments of society, and this mass growth of wealth in the US and other Western states certainly has provided us the comfortable societies we now have – at least arguably a strong ROI for society.
Neil,
I thought you did a fantastic job with the message and remained cool under pressure.
Lori Walsh
Badcock Home FUrniture & More
I applaud the efforts of the NRF to speak out about Health Care Reform and in preparing the NRF Vision for Health Care Reform Document. I encourage NRF members to actively communicate to Senators and Legislators to voice their concerns and offer solutions. In addition to the NRF statements in lower health care costs, there are practical ways to Drastically Lower Medical Costs without implementing a Government Health Plan. For example,Physicians pay huge premiums for Malpractice Insurance. Caps on Malpracitce suits could help the spiraling costs of health care. Also, it is a known fact that many medications remain effective beyond the expiration dates, but yet there is enormous waste in dumping drugs due to expiration dates. By reasonably extending expiration dates, less waste could occur. Even guaze supplies have an expiration date! Millions of dollars are wasted due to a date. It seems that Legislators are not dealing with REAL issues that can make a difference without trillion $$$$ price tags.