Employer based health insurance fails large groups of Americans

WalMart's recent memo outlining a strategy of hiring healthier workers and discouraging the employment of people who might need medical care should be looked at very carefully. It is a very rational strategy for firms which have a large employee base and are concerned about the escalating cost of health care, but it makes a lot of potential workers into pariahs.

The first issue for an employer is how healthy a potential employee is, not how productive they are likely to be. It throws the issue of keeping the workforce healthy back onto the government. That will be a major cause of unemployment and national economic inefficiency. TPM Cafe has an interesting discussion on the issue.