Come on, give the poor old Walton family a break, they are down to their last 140 billion dollars between them, they need that 170 million for their loose change tin. What's a poor person gonna do with a 170 million, they would only waste it
It should be a privilege to work for such a rich family
Something that has always been obvious to me about insurance in the first place. Our society in the aggregate faces all kinds of risks and when these risks are addressed all together the efficiency of insurance of all kinds is more efficiently managed. When companies sell insurance, they begin to truncate the data and make it harder for a government to assess just what the risk actually is. I feel we could read the preamble to our constitution for guidance on who should be the ultimate insurer..."to promote the general welfare."
The purpose of insurance is the pooling of the risks of the citizenry. When the government assumes for instance the role of land use planning, this is done to minimize risks. City, county, state, and federal land use plans contain concepts such as buffer zones between industrial and residential areas and the like to minimize the risks to the general population from hazardous operations. When this planning goes awry and it causes illness or perhaps a lot of deaths, it is a result of poor risk management by the government. A government charged with
promoting the general welfare should indeed bear the responsibility of its management.
In assuming the responsibility for this planning, the government assumes the power to delegate risks to its constituency. With these powers there should be an attached obligation...to insure that its decisions always promote the general welfare, and in the event it errs and causes losses to the general population in terms of its welfare, it should adjust its actions and make the injured parties whole.
This can be done through taxation and allocation of taxes to ameliorate losses that accrue to the public as a result of its planning and assumption of risk. Insurance companies only exist because our government is not a whole and responsible party. It does not have to be this way. Insurance should not be a profitable business as it actually does not have a clearly defined function only serving as a backup to diverse actual systems in our economy.
For instance, insurance companies do not build flood control projects, provide energy, etc. etc. They are not primary producers of goods or services. Insurance should be the province of government. Private for profit insurance companies make their profits in the main by not fully compensating losses commensurate with the funds they receive. They have become the arbiters of the value of losses and their so-called actuarial tables have come to reflect not just the losses they incur but also the profits they take. Non profit government insurance would be the best option for a society's economy in all cases. Somehow, we have lost track of the purpose of government and we have come to regard it as just another corporation competing with other corporations.
Not just health insurance, but all insurance can be provided far more economically by publicly owned agencies. This seems to me a no brainer. Private insurance giants only exist due to failure of government to function properly. Our current system of medical insurance is an outrage in my eyes because it is incomplete and has extreme leakage of pooled funds to profit takers in all quarters.
I frankly do not know why Walmart should object to publicly owned government medical insurance. It would in fact reduce their costs....unless they were invested in insurance companies, in which case that would increase their costs. Of course, they would have to pay their fair share of the taxes.
