That can be said for ANY large corporation, and has nothing to do with Wal-Mart itself, but due to the fact that "poor" people in America have a fat rich life by world standards.

Wal-Mart is picked on BECAUSE it is the largest. It is not even close to the worst. But like the idiot who lost $10, and was looking around the corner from where he lost it says "the light is better over here". So it is with the ones that hate wal-mart because ....... "the light is better over there".

And before you go denying it, think about one thing. Why did Maryland have to pass a law stipulating not only a minimum employer amount for health care, but a minimum employee base that would only affect Wal-mart? If Wal-wart was the worst, a simple minimum would have gotten them. They are not. But they are the biggest.

Last time I checked Loca, nobody has to work at Wal-Mart.  Like most jobs in the U.S. you are free to work where you want.  Why do you always have to blame someone else?

Artysim -

A little follow-up quote on Cuban healthcare:



From WWW Link.

I agree that it is not fair but it is part of our social obligation to help those that can not help themselves. If a citizen is ill or injured and can not afford the health care needed to mend then we as good citizens should pick up the tab. My gripe is that we are doing it for ever Tom Dick and Harry that is not a citizen which is one of the reasons why things are so expensive.

It was Senator Kennedy that brought about health insurance for the masses in the form of HMO’s, this was THE THING to save us all from high health costs. Twenty years later Senator Kennedy cried that the HMO’s were taking advantage of people and we need a new system to save all of us from high health costs. Translation: his fix did not work so he has a new fix that won’t work. Because the insurance companies are not fully entrenched in the health care industry costs have done nothing but go up. If we socialize medicine and medical care the costs will drop like a rock but we will be back where we were before the HMO’s got involved. We will see people turned away because the government can’t pay for the procedure, examples would be Japan, Canada, and Great Briton with Japan being in the best shape but they charge a 40% tax on your income in order to provide free health care. This in a country where a melon cost 75 dollars and a cup of coffee costs you five dollars if you get the cheap kind. I am basing this off of when I lived in Japan in the magical 80’s before their economy collapsed again.

My point is that if the free market continues to be managed by politics rather than free market forces we will continue to have rising health care costs. When the market place is left on its own prices stabilize to an affordable level. When the government gets its hands in the mix the price goes up dramatically.

How do we fix this? Bite the bullet and costs will go down. The first things to eliminate are the lawsuits. If a doctor is bad get him out of the profession. The malpractice insurance will drop like a rock and sixty percent of the cost of health care with it. Two grand a day to stay in a hospital is outrageous I can get a hotel room for three hundred dollars a day and get ill and the concierge will have a doctor in my room within the hour who will treat me for a minor illness and they will add a hundred bucks to my bill. But when a hospital has to spend eighteen million a year on insurance you better believe they are going to charge two grand a day plus fifty dollars for an aspirin and twenty dollars for a plastic cup to drink water from. The actual cost for a patient in a hospital is roughly 150 to 200 a day, insurance for the hospital, and a separate policy for the doctor and one for the nurse kick up the cost. Then you have tests that have to be done to protect the doctor that rack up a hefty fee. Tests you don’t need, tests the doctor knows you don’t need but he needs to protect himself from trial lawyers that will ask if he had done this test might the patient not been injured? The doctor will have to answer yes and lose the case and his profession because no insurance company will touch him again. The hospital will get sued if they don’t have the most up to date equipment to run these tests even if last years model does the same thing as this years model only three minutes faster.

A doctor just out of med school makes between 95 and 150 an hour, between his malpractice insurance and his student loans, he makes enough to afford a used car for the first 8 to eight years and not live in the best of areas. My girlfriend is an ICU nurse which is how I got the information.

The next thing we have to do is reduce the cost of education. Charging 50 grand a year to go to school for 7 years racks up a huge debt on the student. It is not so much the cost to education it is the cost of the classes you have to take that mean nothing to your chosen profession. They did away with ethics but make you take humanities and a host of classes no one needs but they don’t cost much to the school and they charge a premium price. Now days everyone is demanding a college degree for even the simplest of professions. A prison guard needs a college degree. All he has to do is count the inmates and report when the numbers don’t match. For this he has to have two years of college just to get the job and promise to get his bachelors degree within five years. And since he as a degree he needs more money to pay for it and his salary goes up and then your taxes go up.
If you are a doctor, or an engineer a college degree is a good thing. Case in point look at all the people saved by medicine, oh wait, most of the medical advances are made by high school drop outs, well we have engineers, oh wait, the titanic was designed by college graduates and Microsoft was created by a college drop out. Anyway a college degree is a good thing. My son has several of them to prove it.

My point is we demand so much education that we price ourselves out of business.

What happened to "debate," Kupe?

I'd take that. The current going rate for primary care locum tenens physicians in the southwest is $55 per hour and you pay your own malpractice.

All doctors pay their own malpractice insurance the hospitals have not paid that in decades. But the doctor still needs to be partially covered by the hospital and the doctors have to pay for privileges if they want to use that hospital. Even at 150 an hour it equates to 15 dollars an hour before taxes and after they pay their insurance and student loans. Part of the reason health care is so high is because doctors are leaving the profession in droves, even with insurance they can still lose everything with one law suit. Thanks to former Senator Edwards who won a 100 plus million dollar law suit, most obstetricians left the state because they could not afford insurance and food in the same month. Then the good Senator cries about the lack of affordable health care when he was the sole reason the costs skyrocketed in his state.

What do you say for the people who are born with health problems.. Or
people who have genetic or hereditary conditions such as diabetes....Let them fend for themselves? Not all health problems are a single individuals fault. You cant fault a person for being born with a health condition anymore than a person that isnt

No, I can't, but I also shouldn't have to pay for their problems although we already do (not fully but partially) just most people don't realize it. When a company has to get a health evaluation done on it's employees when enlisting with an insurance carrier, everyone pays a higher premium if anyone has serious risks. You could have say 35 out of 40 employees that rarely ever even go to a doctor, don't have any prescriptions but the other 5 have families with serious problems. The premium for everyone (including employer contribution) is then made higher to cover the risk.

Insurance is a business. Life isn't fair. Is it fair that some people go through life perfectly healthy while others suffer continual health problems? No. Is it fair to the insurance company to give a low premium to everyone because it's simply unfair that some have conditions that are no fault of their own? No. They are a business and need to be able to cover costs and still make a living. Is it then fair for everyone to have to pay a really high premium to make sure that everyone is charged the same no matter what conditions they have? No. That only benefits the insurance company and totally screws the people who never go to the doctor (is it their fault they're never sick?).