At first blush, when I saw today’s front-page headline in The New York Times entitled "A Health Plan For Wal-Mart: Less Stinginess",  thought…hmmm…what’s up here? The upshot of the story:

The company, according to data available for the first time, is offering better coverage to a greater number of workers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, provides insurance to 100,000 more workers than it did just three years ago — and it is now easier for many to sign up for health care at Wal-Mart than at its rival, Target, whose reputation glows in comparison.

Wal-Mart has hardly become a standard-bearer for corporate America: it still insures fewer than half its 1.4 million employees in the United States.

    There really is less here than meets the eye. Once you read deeper into the story, you find out that:

The company eliminated onerous fees like $150 monthly for covering a spouse and cut out separate deductibles, like an additional $1,000 for a hospital stay.

A family can pay as little as $250 a year in premiums if it is willing to have a $4,000 deductible and be responsible for as much as $10,000 in medical bills, roughly the same plan that cost them $1,500 a few years ago.

Better coverage costs more: a plan where the family pays a $700 deductible and is responsible only for up to $4,000 in medical bills costs nearly $7,000 a year.

Several critics contend that the company’s low-wage workers still cannot afford a plan offering significant coverage. “It’s optics — it looks pretty,” said Charles Rader, who negotiates benefits for the United Food and Commercial Workers.

    I’m sorry: this is not health care coverage. This is simply draining a little less money from already struggling people for a smidgen more coverage. In fact, the article points out that people are still voting with their feet: for all the changes in the plan, enrollment has gone from 48 percent of Wal-Mart workers in 2004 to a whopping 48 percent in 2007.

    Here’s what’s wrong with the frame in this article:

    It fails to mention what coverage would be like for all Wal-Mart workers in a single-payer health care system. The comparison that the Times uses–in a graph at the top of the article–compares Wal-Mart’s "improvements" to three other retailers (Costco, Home depot and Target). In other words, the entire article is simply a comparison to employer-based health care plans–which is a failed model. Insane.