Anita Weier of our staff reported several weeks ago that a significant number of Wal-Mart employees in Wisconsin wind up having to rely on the state-paid BadgerCare program for their health insurance at a significant cost to the state's taxpayers.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week repeated that information and added that while Wal-Mart by far leads the list of big corporations whose workers need to take advantage of taxpayer-paid poverty programs, there are several other big firms whose workers need to do so too.

In April of this year, the paper reported, about 3,000 employees and their dependents were enrolled in BadgerCare from 10 huge corporations. Wal-Mart led the list with 1,252 of those 3,000. The Aurora Health Care organization near Milwaukee added 321, Menards 217, McDonald's 200, Manpower 181, Lands' End (a division of Sears) 179, Kmart 184, Walgreens 146, APAC 139, and Target 120.

The annual cost to the taxpayers for those workers was calculated to be nearly $6.4 million. In other words, Wisconsin taxpayers are subsidizing those 10 corporations' payrolls because they see fit not to provide adequate health coverage for workers.

Taxpayers are often appalled to hear such news, but it has become a fact of life in these economic times. Big corporations are making record profits to appease the barons of Wall Street while their workers go begging for benefits. Our political leaders, though, look the other way, swallowing the corporate line that if they had to provide workers more, there would be fewer jobs.

That argument aside, all this ought to be leading the U.S. government to finally admit that taxpayers are already paying a substantial portion of America's health care costs and that we could make the system so much more fair by enacting a national single-payer health plan.

Our convoluted health care system has spiraled so far out of control that it is beginning to threaten the nation's economy. The corporations on the Journal Sentinel list are just small examples of the problems. General Motors and Ford, two of the nation's economic giants, are facing deep financial turmoil - perhaps, even insolvency - because health care costs for employees and retirees are adding hundreds of dollars to the costs of their cars.

Their biggest foreign competitors have some form of national health care, plans that cover all their citizens at costs far below what Americans and the people they work for are now forced to pay.

It isn't that we don't have enough money to enact a single-payer system, the equivalent of a Medicare plan for the entire nation. Individuals and companies are already spending billions for our current system, of which more than 20 percent goes for administrative costs.

Anational health plan could not only eliminate our national shame of 40 million Americans with no health coverage, but could save some of our major employers from bankruptcy.

Dave Zweifel is editor of The Capital Times.

© 2005 Capital Times

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