John Kerry is running a really interesting campaign for the presidency. He’s clearly running well to the left of where he ran in 2004, especially in primary season. I don’t know if this is a result of lessons learned in 2004 or his best estimate of what the political climate in the party is like right now or some combination thereof. Hell, maybe he’s actually running for president on the same kind of platform his voting record in the senate would indicate he believes in.

He’s given a series of speeches at Faneuil Hall in Boston this year where he has outlined his plan for this or that. His latest is on healthcare. He’s calling for universal healthcare by 2012. One of the first things he does is address the stupid and wrongheaded notion that we can’t afford heatlhcare or that it will bankrupt businesses and slow our economy:

Two corporations show the dangerous path ahead for employer-based health coverage. One used to be the largest company in the world - General Motors. The other is the largest company today - Wal-Mart.

As General Motors goes, people used to say, so goes the country. Well today, General Motors is weighed down with so many health care costs that it’s been called “an HMO dressed up as an auto company.” GM adds $1,500 to the cost of every car and truck it produces just to pay for health care for its workers. To give you an idea of how much this affects American businesses in the global marketplace, Toyota pays only $500 in health care costs per vehicle.

Now this isn’t just a problem for manufacturing industries. The CEO of Starbucks, Howard Shultz, said his company spends more on health care than coffee beans. They’re trying to do the right thing, but the people running our country aren’t doing the right thing by them.

Companies like Wal-Mart have adopted a totally different strategy - use workers until they get sick, don’t cover them for check-ups, and then tell them they’re on their own. The nice person who greets you at Wal-Mart’s door is shown the door when illness strikes. Whether it’s because Wal-Mart hires part-time workers and doesn’t offer them insurance, or offers health care packages most workers there can’t possibly afford, passing along enormous costs to families and taxpayers, the bottom line is clear: at Wal-Mart, less than forty percent of the employees have health insurance. That’s 600,000 working Americans on their own. It’s unconscionable and it is unacceptable that five of the ten richest people in America are Wal-Mart stockholders from the same family - worth double-digit billions each - but they can’t find the money to secure health coverage for their own workers and their families.