Maryland Health Care Campaign Launched

This just in: Dave Smith, President of the UAW local 6969, says GM, Ford and the UAW are all joining forces to push for a bill that will require employers to contribute 5% of payroll to pay for employees’ GM and/or Ford car purchases.

In response to an AP interview, Smith said “All workers need a new car, as long as it is a GM or Ford car, to get to work. With the rising costs of supporting a family today, workers need to be able to get to work. It’s only fair that employers shoulder some of that burden. 5% of payroll is nothing to big companies if it means their employees can get to work on time. Everyone deserves a new car. It’s not fair that there are rich companies out there who do not want to help pay for transportation for their employees, especially a single mom with 7 kids. How is she supposed to afford a new GM or Ford? This bill is designed to protect workers”.

GM spokesman Rick Thomas said “it’s about time other employers started to contribute. Employees need to get to work. It’s a basic right.”

Community activists and groups ranging from The Popular Front For The Liberation Of Palestine and NOW, as well as NAMBLA, Students For A Democratic Society and The Communist Party USA all support the law.

A vote is expected shortly.

(This story is completely false. It is designed to insult the Maryland health care bill and make people realize how ridiculous such bills really are.)

Ellis--Nick. Again WM would just dump its employees and their health problems on the taxpayer. That’s what this is about. It’s not a secret to anyone---that WM and others like them are deliberately doing this. You don’t want a national health care plan and you hate anything that has to do with taxes---so what is your solution? Let someone who can’t afford the treatment they need---because of for one thing extremely high medical care costs these days---suffer whatever consequences come with them? Should the public be forced to pay the taxes to pay for the people who will have to pick the dead people up off the streets who couldn’t afford to go the hospital or for treatment or should we forget all about that and just leave them where they’ve fallen?

Larry

There you go again. I never said that I don’t have sympathy for the less fortunate. I was once less fortunate. Actually, that is an unfair term. A great many of the “less fortunate” are in that position by choice. Many others aren’t but where do you draw the line between personal and taxpayer responsibilities?

Wal-Mart’s employees’ health problems are none of Wal-Mart’s affair. If you are a Wal-Mart employee and you happen to get sick, that is your responsibility. Wal-Mart is your employer, not your mother or your doctor. Whatever happened to personal responsibility in this country? I will even go so far as to say the government and the unions are responsible for our high health care costs today.

The government is to blame for passing Medicare, Medicaid and The Wage Control Act and for engaging in ridiculous behavior, at the behest of the AMA, to limit the number of doctors in the US. The government gave out free health care and then it forced employers to begin compensating their employees in other ways, such as health insurance. This hurt the traditional pay as you go health system we had. The government does not allow new medical schools to open and it also keeps non-doctors from doing things such as fixing broken bones, doing physicals, etc. By limiting Americans’ access to medical providers, the government has driven up the cost of health care. I won’t even mention the asinine FDA drug evaluations and the new, unneeded prescription drug plan.

Unions bear some blame as well. This is mostly due to the fact that the unions pushed for increased health benefits for their members to the point where these legacy costs broke entire industries, from textile to steel to general manufacturing to the airlines to the auto industry. Now that there are millions of union retirees without pensions and health insurance, guess who pays? That’s right-the taxpayer.

There are too many people with too many hands reaching for handouts and not enough people producing the wealth to fund the handouts. It is a precarious situation.

People need to take more responsibility for their health care. Eat right, exercise, stop smoking, stop drinking to excess, stop engaging in foolish sexual behavior, etc. People should be allowed to save, seperately and tax-free, for their health care. It should not necessarily be connected to a high-deductible health plan. Perhaps people can build up an accont to a maximum of $3 million or something. I know most people will never come near that but what it does is allow people to save and pay as they go. It also places some responsibility with the patient and they may be more selective about new wonder drugs and treatments if they are footing some or all of the bill.

Americans are smart consumers when they have to pay. When someone else pays, Americans get an attack of stupidity and forget about the price. There is a price for everything, including your healthcare, and your employer is not responsible for your personal expenses.

Are you saying that it’s your personal responsibility to not get sick or to be injured ever if you can’t afford it? I mean that’s ridiculous. Some WM employee comes to work with the flu maybe because they’re afraid of being fired for sick time and passes it along to everyone else? I mean how do you combat that? That happens everywhere. That happens where I work. Pretty much for you it comes down to if they can’t afford to get sick they have no business getting sick. If they can’t afford getting hurt they have no business getting hurt. Following along the straight edge of that logic comes the affordability of cancer and heart attacks which brings us back to the above scenario that I outlined. This personal responsibility that you fall back on is not a solution. You don’t have a solution or any use for a solution. No national health care. No employer responsibility. No nothing. The only thing left is escalating health care costs. But since those are corporate kinds of costs I guess they’re okay.

Larry you are missing the point. We are responsible for our own health not some company. Just because it is the largest in the world doesn’t make it responsible for everything you and I do, or the rest of the world. Some of my family works for this company. They take very good care of them and not once has their job been threatened when they or a family member came down sick. Matter of FACT the wonderful management team was there for them even more than you can imagine, not because they were told to because they just know what to do to take good care of their people. The people who are unhappy are the ones who quit because they can get better help thru the government or because they just didn’t want to work. This is not Wal-marts fault this is the governments and society fault. How about getting facts from the people who know instead of from the people who make up what they know.

That of course depends deinse (denise?) of what you consider the point or the main point to be. I’m not sure if this is Nick from Wheeling again and if he’s not writing under several different pseudonyms. He rejects though outright (at least as I read him) any other responsibility other than personal responsibilty and I would think to extend that kind of thinking natural progression leads us to decide for ourselves what that personal responsibility should be. I will posit you a different kind of main point and you can reject it if you feel like---but I think the best kind of society is one in which we all share and we all grow together---we’re not just out for No. 1--more or less ourselves. That we don’t leave milions upon millions (or even a single person) to flounder miserably their entire lives. Nick is right in the sense that the way in which the govt. intrudes itself in its charade to show that it works for the benefit of all has been insidious at best.
This is no excuse however to give the corporate and banking worlds carte blanche to continue to blow up sections of a more or less corrupted society to enrich themselves.

denise--

wal-mart absolutely has an obligation to its employees, how can you think that it doesn’t?  as the world’s largest employer wal-mart has nearly 1.7 million employees’ and made over $10B in profit last year.  moreover, CEO lee scott made $27M last year.  despite all of this wal-mart fails to provide 53% of its associates with health care and sends 60% of associates children to state funded health programs.

the greatest welfare abuser of all time: wal-mart.

ryan