Wal Mart and Medicaid in PA

The Inky's got a story today on how one in six of th 48,000 Wal Mart employees in PA are on Medicaid, the state medical assistance program. Wal Mart is the largest employer in the U.S. let alone PA and their lack of proper health coverage [*I don't have any healthcare coverage right now temping] is costing us PA residents $15M a year.

Wal Mart, an employer of 1.3M nationwide raked in $11.2B in PROFIT in 2005. Do some math. If they were to take that full $11.2B and redistribute it to the full 1.3M [that's including the execs and managers and other white collar employees] it would result in $8,615 in extra money. Take away the execs and other already well-paid employees, and that numer rises a little across the board for those on state assistance. Now the crazy thing is, many of these people are employed "full time" as Wal Mart calls it. Wal Mart's version of "full time" employment is thirty-four hours per week. Extrapolate that against a normal forty-hour work week and over a year's time, you're short 312 hours! That's 7.8 weeks in real full-time employment.

"Wal-Mart is making billions in profits, while pushing people onto medical assistance at a time when 100,000 people in Pennsylvania were in jeopardy of losing benefits," said Jonathan Stein, general counsel at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia. "The situation only makes life difficult for other poor people who could only look to Medicaid."

Swelling state medical assistance rolls and higher health-care costs compelled Gov. Rendell last year to limit some services and increase some fees for many of the 1.8 million Pennsylvanians on medical assistance.

Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the state, has a total of 7,577 of its employees, or 15.8 percent, on medical assistance in Pennsylvania. The company's workforce is more than double the number of workers at the next-largest retailer, Giant Food.

Giant Food has about 19,000 total workers.

Good god I hate Wal Mart.