[HM2Viking]

<H3>Healthcare

What they can allow themselves to do with people’s healthcare for a profit—they are making profit-based decisions with people’s health, which to me is unbelievable. This company that makes $10.5 billion in profit can tell a single mom of two making $9 an hour, “You know those kidney stones you have? Sorry, we can’t pay.”
—Jared West, Greeley, Colorado, Wal-Mart worker.159

Wal-Mart claimed in a letter to Human Rights Watch that one of the reasons that “people want to work at Wal-Mart” is because the company offers “affordable health benefits.”160 Current and former Wal-Mart workers, however, repeatedly told Human Rights Watch that they were not insured through the company because they could not afford coverage.161 Joshua Streckeisen, a former worker at the New Castle, Pennsylvania, Wal-Mart who was uninsured when he worked at the company, told Human Rights Watch, “I couldn’t afford it with the money I was making. I couldn’t have paid the bills.”162 Similarly, Alicia Sylvia, a full-time worker at the Loveland, Colorado, Wal-Mart, told Human Rights Watch, “I don’t have their health insurance because I can’t afford it. . . . My kids are on CHP+ Colorado. . . . It’s like Medicaid, but for children only.”163 “Bridgid Carpenter,” a Greeley, Colorado, Wal-Mart worker speaking to Human Rights Watch on condition of anonymity, also told Human Rights Watch that she was covered by her mother’s health insurance and her infant son was on Medicaid.164 A former Las Vegas, Nevada, Wal-Mart worker, Valerie González, likewise explained,“I was not on their health insurance plan. It was too expensive. . . . We can’t with five kids. We just didn’t have insurance. The kids didn’t have insurance.”165
As of the fall of 2006, only roughly 62 percent of Wal-Mart workers who were eligible to enroll in Wal-Mart’s Associates Medical Plan (AMP) chose to do so.166 Two of those who enrolled told Human Rights Watch that one of the key reasons they stayed with Wal-Mart was “because I need the insurance.”167 This “take-up rate,” however, was well below the national retail industry average of 75 percent that year and the national average of 80 percent for employers with over 5,000 workers.168

</H3>http://hrw.org/reports/2007/us0507/5.htm

[ProudGayRN]

Originally Posted by HM2Viking

[b]

</H3>http://hrw.org/reports/2007/us0507/5.htm

yes now we can talk about how the United States and Wal-Mart is violating peoples human rights right? how pathetic - I love it when the left always tries to make the United States the focus of everything wrong in the world..its like you have a country like Iran that is cutting off peoples hands and regularly killing people for being gay yet the esteemed "Human Rights Watch" organization never says a thing about that, they can only pick on Wal-Mart and the United States(great satan) right mr viking?