Obese and smoking employees of Wal-Mart are facing the wrath of its low-cost strategy. Smoking creates a greater burden on Wal-Mart’s health insurance bill; therefore, it has decided to shift that cost to it smoking employees by charging surcharges as high as $2000 per year. These high, insensitive premiums may be seen as an incentive to quit, but in many circumstances, it will lead to the cancellation of health insurance and further endanger the employee’s life.
If Wal-Mart is just protecting its bottom line, analogously, governments can impose rash premiums for polluting. Governments are concerned with the welfare of society and to protect the environment it should charge Wal-Mart outrageous fees for each ton of C02. Similar to Wal-Mart’s policy, government should require Wal-Mart to reduce its pollution to a bare minimal level before it qualifies for lower premiums.
To avoid paying premiums Wal-Mart has shipped its operations overseas, but employees cannot simply quit in this volatile economic environment. This surcharge is not promoting healthy lifestyles because it is not “part of a broader effort to help them quit” such as anti-smoking programs. It is just another Wal-Mart ploy to cut costs as the expense of society.