SACRAMENTO - Incensed by the denials of Wal-Mart executives about their health benefits, Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (San Jose) and other California legislators called for additional investigation and oversight over Wal-Mart and the benefits they provide their workers, and the burden such policies place on taxpayers and public health programs.

"If they already provide good health coverage to their workers, then why would they oppose legislation and ballot initiatives to require employer-provided health coverage?" said Assemblywoman Lieber. "Why contribute a half-million dollars to defeat this type of law unless they agree that they get the benefit of taxpayers paying for the health care of many of their workers? Regardless of one's opinion about how best to cover our state's uninsured, it isn't fair for large corporations to put more of a burden on taxpayers".

This issue came up in the context of the debate that began last year about Senate Bill 2, which would have ensured that the workers of large- and medium-size employers get health coverage on-the-job. The debate has continued during consideration of the referendum on SB 2. Supporters of employer-paid health insurance have pointed out a UC-Berkeley study that shows that taxpayers paid $32 million for the cost of health care for the workers of Wal-Mart, which opposes these kinds of measures.

"The Senate Budget Committee will, as part of the budget process next year, investigate the extent that Wal-Mart does not provide coverage, and the extent that California taxpayers then pay for care for Wal-Mart's workers," said Senator Wes Chesbro (Eureka), who chairs both the Senate Budget Committee, and the Budget Subcommittee on Health and Human Services. "We need to figure out if Wal-Mart is not paying their fair share into the health care system on which we all rely. We all pay more if we allow Wal-Mart to pay less."

This past week, Wal-Mart contributed $500,000 to oppose the health care initiative, and yet denied the claim. In the LA Times over the weekend, Wal-Mart executives were quoted as saying "There's no proof that any of our associates are on public assistance... I defy anyone to prove it."

Assemblywoman Lieber said she would work with her colleagues to investigate if CalPERS should divest from Wal-Mart. As of June 2004, CalPERS owned 18,855,268 shares of Wal-Mart. At a closing price yesterday of over fifty dollars a share -- $53.72, those shares are worth over one billion dollars, $1,012,904,997.

"It would be ironic if CalPERS finds that for its investment in Wal-Mart and its expansion in California, the return is nothing more than additional hundreds of thousands more uninsured, and that it leads to the increasing health care costs for CalPERS and all Californians," said Lieber. "Every time Wal-Mart doesn't provide coverage to its workers, not only do we pay as taxpayers, but that increases the pressure on competing entities to drop coverage. When Sam's Club doesn't provide good coverage, it places additional pressure on Costco, which does provide good coverage, to scale back benefits. That in turn creates more uninsured, and places even further burden on our health care system."

"When I was a county supervisor, we devoted much of our budget to public hospitals and health care programs. However, we found anecdotally that many of the uninsured were workers and the family members of workers, including those of large, profitable companies," said Assemblyman Leland Yee (San Francisco).

"We will use the tools at our disposal to investigate these claims. Georgia, for example, did a survey to find out who were the employers of the parents of the children in that state's PeachCare program. They found that the biggest employer with their workers' children on the program was Wal-Mart, with over 10,000. The next highest employer had less than 800 children on the program. We should conduct a similar survey for Healthy Families, California's version of the Child Health Insurance Program," said Senator Chesbro.

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