Wal-Mart on Wal-Mart - Newsroom: Bernie Sanders - U.S. Senator for Vermont

A Wal-Mart spokesman on Monday told The Huffington Post that only 5 percent of the discount chain’s workers were on Medicaid. The spokesman was attempting to rebut Sen. Bernie Sanders’ assertion on MSNBC that the Walton family, the Wal-Mart owners, got to be the richest family in America by paying workers so poorly that they need Medicaid and food stamps to survive. What the spokesman may have forgotten to mention was that an internal memo to Wal-Mart’s board of directors (obtained by The New York Times) acknowledged that 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart's 1.33 million U.S. employees were uninsured or on Medicaid. The 2005 memo by M. Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart's executive vice president for benefits, had more to say about how the company treats its workers:

• Wal-Mart's workers are getting sicker than the national population with preventable diseases such as obesity (p. 4). More than half of Wal-Mart's workers (p. 8) are not covered by its health insurance plans, meaning many do not have access to necessary preventative care and doctors' visits. "Our workers are getting sicker than the national population, particularly with obesity-related diseases" (p. 4).
• Wal-Mart's workers aren't using primary care because so many of them lack coverage. Instead, they opt to use taxpayer-subsidized emergency rooms. The Wal-Mart workforce "tends to over utilize emergency room and hospital services and underutilize prescriptions and doctor visits" (p. 4-5).
• In a survey, Wal-Mart workers scored the company "poorly" on the cost of healthcare coverage for employees (p. 6).

Wal-Mart on Wal-Mart - Newsroom: Bernie Sanders - U.S. Senator for Vermont