State Health Care Mandate Legislation - A Scorecard

Editorial Boards Nationwide Agree: Special Interest "Health Care" Bills Won’t Lower Health Care Costs; Could Cost Jobs and Hurt Economic Growth

What Prominent Editorial Pages are Writing about These Bills:

• “…a legislative mugging masquerading as an act of benevolent social engineering.” (The Washington Post, 1/12/06)
   
• “This is all about perceptions -- and doing the unions' bidding. Maryland isn't going to make a dent in its uninsured population by harassing Wal-Mart. Residents of Maryland must have no need for low prices or jobs. Otherwise, their legislative representatives wouldn't be chasing out America's largest retailer and private employer.”  (Investor’s Business Daily,  01/17/06)
   
• “…This is clearly not a pro-growth strategy, but one that would drain profits from job-creating businesses to fund ill-conceived social crusades -- like the Wal-Mart bill. …Placing the state between an employer and employees is a sure way to kill jobs. Unions should not look to the state to do what they haven't been able to convince Wal-Mart workers to do -- organize themselves and demand the benefits they want.”  (The Detroit News, 01/22/06)
   
• “…rather than reform Medicaid to control its costs or stop its rampant fraud, the politicians find it easier to sock it to private business. One result will be that companies will create fewer new jobs…this is bad news for both business and workers in the long run.” (The Wall Street Journal, 01/16/06)
   
• “Unions, which desperately want to unionize Wal-Mart, have found a way to stick it to the company…Figuring out how to shift the cost of health care to someone, anyone else, has become a growth industry for insurers, corporations and governments. Singling out Wal-Mart for doing so, and subjecting it to state edicts that only affect it, is a cheap shot.” (Dayton Daily News, 01/16/06)
   
• “This isn’t reform. It’s an anti-reform, and indeed a raw power grab on the part of a union that now seeks to gain through legislative log-rolling what it has been unable to gain at the bargaining table or the ballot box. It should be resisted with every bit as much energy as HillaryCare was resisted a decade ago.” (The Intelligencer (Wheeling), 1/25/06)
   
• “These measures are just another tactic by organized labor, which has failed time and again to get Wal-Mart stores to unionize. The anti-Wal-Mart forces feed the notion that the giant retailer stiffs employees when it comes to health care. Never mind that… 86 percent of Wal-Mart employees have health insurance (more than half of them through the company) and the company estimates it paid its 1.3 million employees $4.7 billion in benefits during the past year.” (The Daily Oklahoman, 1/31/06)
   
• “The proposal is onerous on several levels: It diminishes job creation, it puts the state in the midst of business management decisions as well as in the midst of what is typically a federal public policy area, and it is truly little more than interest-group politicking.” (The Orange County Register, 2/9/06)
   
• “…union-led, media-abetted crusade to demonize Wal-Mart as Public Enemy No. 1… [Sen. Carole Migden’s D-San Francisco] allies made plain her target is Wal-Mart. But Migden and her union pals have a basic problem: Their anti-Wal-Mart campaign is built on myths and economic nonsense.” (San Diego Union-Tribune, 2/14/06)
   
• “The Georgia bill, with its 10,000-employee threshold, will do little to address the problem where it is most acute --- in small- to medium-size companies that can't afford to subsidize employee health insurance plans at all. It will also do nothing to control the escalating cost of health insurance premiums that continue to produce higher deductibles and co-payments from beneficiaries while restricting more and more services every year.... Beating up on Wal-Mart is easy. A longer-term solution to the state's problem of the uninsured requires a more comprehensive approach.” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, , 2/15/06)
   
• “…amounts to little more than ‘benevolent social engineering’ and is both legally and morally suspect. The Fair Share effort, however, ignores the fact that most large employers already offer health care coverage to their employees. More often it's the smaller companies that cannot afford to offer health benefits. This is a misguided approach to solving the problem of the uninsured or reducing the cost of health insurance.” (Tampa Tribune, 2/16/06)