Wal-Mart Watch: States get tired of keeping Wal-Mart on welfare:

A survey by Georgia officials found that more than 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees were in the state's health program for children at an annual cost of nearly $10 million to taxpayers. A North Carolina hospital found that 31 percent of 1,900 patients who described themselves as Wal-Mart employees were on Medicaid, while an additional 16 percent had no insurance at all. And backers of a measure that will be on California's ballot tomorrow, which would force big employers like Wal-Mart to either provide affordable health insurance to their workers or pay into a state insurance pool, say Wal-Mart employees without company insurance are costing California's state health care programs an estimated $32 million a year. Meanwhile, in Washington State, where the insurance commissioner is pushing the legislature to adopt a law similar to the one on the California ballot, companies that struggle to compete with Wal-Mart while insuring most of their own workers have become openly critical. "Socially, we're engaged in a race to the bottom," said Craig Cole, the chief executive of Brown & Cole Stores, a supermarket chain that employs about 2,000 workers in Washington and adjoining states and pays for insurance coverage for about 95 percent of its employees. "Do we want to allow competition based on exploitation of the work force?" he asked. Wal-Mart, which disputes the California figures and says it cannot verify the Georgia and North Carolina data, says its employees are largely insured. It cites internal surveys indicating that 90 percent of its employees have insurance - many through means other than Wal-Mart's coverage because they are senior citizens on Medicare, students covered by their parents' policies or employees with second jobs or working spouses. "We are doing everything we can to take care of our associates and not shift costs," Ms. Chambers said.

Shifting costs is, of course, exactly what Wal=Mart is doing by keeping its employees among the working poor, dependent on the very government assistance programs Wal-Mart-backed politicians are so eagerly working to dismantle.