Amid all its squirming, obfuscating and evasion over its crummy health benefits, Wal-Mart put its finger on an undeniable truth:

“The soaring cost of health care in America cannot be sustained over the long term by any business that offers health benefits to its employees,” said CEO Lee Scott last week.

He is 100 percent right. Our nation's system of employment-based health insurance, which covers only about six in 10 Americans, is headed for implosion.

The cost of health insurance rose 9.2 percent last year, following four years of double-digit increases.

Ultimately, uncontrolled costs will make American firms uncompetitive if they continue to offer good health coverage to their workers. That's why fewer companies are offering it. As of last year, 60 percent of companies offered coverage, down from 69 percent five years earlier, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey.

We need another system. Workers know it. Bosses know it. The sooner business recognizes that fact — and uses its considerable influence in Congress — the sooner we'll get a tax-funded national health insurance program that covers everyone.

Wal-Mart is feeling less strain than most big companies because it covers fewer of its employees — just 46 percent of its workers, compared to a large-company average of 68 percent — and because its benefits are skimpy. Wal-Mart pays only three-fifths of what other companies pay for each covered employee.

The cost of good health coverage is already jeopardizing companies such as General Motors and Ford, which still provide generous coverage to employees and retirees under union contracts.

In Missouri, the supermarket owners are joining with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to push a bill in Jefferson City that they hope would level the playing field and help workers. The bill would force Wal-Mart to spend more on employee health care or pay into a state fund. The proposal is patterned on a new law in Maryland, and several other state legislatures are taking up the issue.

Fear of such laws spreading, combined with the relentless public relations drubbing Wal-Mart has taken for its labor practices, have brought small concessions from Wal-Mart. The company says it will reduce part-timers' two-year waiting period for health coverage, although it won't say by how much. It also will allow part-timers to include their children in their plans and make its bottom-tier plan available to more workers.

Through programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, government already pays 45 percent of American health costs. Throw in coverage provided for government employees and various tax breaks and the figure hits 60 percent.

Medicare could serve as an excellent model for a national health care program. It operates with one-third the overhead of private health insurers, and its enormous purchasing power lets it get lower prices from medical providers.

It wouldn't be a major leap to put all Americans on an expanded version of Medicare. We'd pay higher taxes but no insurance charges. Employers would no longer be saddled with health care. Workers would no longer worry about health care for themselves or their children. And we could toss the disgraceful private health insurance industry, with its wasteful bureaucracy and inscrutable coverage rules, into the Dumpster.

Everyone would have decent coverage that they could never lose. And America could do it for far less than we're paying now. Imagine what could happen if labor and business joined forces and spoke with one, powerful voice. Congress would have to listen.

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch