Walmart – Save More. Live Better. Be Heartless.

March 27, 2008

Walmart – Save More. Live Better. Be Heartless.

UPDATE: Walmart has apparently dropped its claim – and points to online blogs and petitions as helping them to, “step back and look at a situation in a different way.”

CNN reports on how Walmart has decided to exercise their right to reclaim damages awarded to Debbie Shank as a result of her successful suit, in order to repay their health care expenditures used to care for Debbie since her accident.

I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to pay a cent or two more to make sure people like Debbie are cared for. Thing is, with 90 billion in quarterly revenue, we’d be paying more like a hundredth of a cent more. While Walmart is within their rights to claim this money, the question is, why would they? Can they truly be that heartless? Is this the health care system we want, when the businesses mandated to support the health care of employees must act as opportunist predators to “keep costs down”?

I find this contemptible – and I’m pretty sure the fault does not belong solely to Walmart. Our obsession with bringing down prices in our lives must yield a weakness somewhere. You can’t get something for nothing as our entitlement-hungry society seems eager to forget. Sooner or later, someone has to pay. This time, it was Debbie Shank.

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