Wal-Mart needs to do right by its workers. And the Bush administration should stop letting the company off the hook.

Wal-Mart, as the nation’s largest employer, has a responsibility to provide adequate health insurance to its employees.

Currently, less than half of Wal-Mart’s workers are covered by company health insurance, compared with more than 80 percent of employees covered at its competitor, Costco, where workers are unionized. Nationally, an average of 68 percent of workers at large companies receive health insurance coverage from their employers.

Wal-Mart recently announced changes in its health insurance plan that may sound good, with premiums as low as $11 per month. But a $1,000 deductible and a $25,000 cap on coverage in the first year will still leave the majority of Wal-Mart’s employees — many of whom earn an average of less than $19,000 per year — and their families one major accident or illness away from financial ruin.

And those $11 per month premiums will be available to only a few employees. Monthly premiums will average $37 for a single parent and $65 for a family, which comes out to $780 per year for family coverage. By contrast, 73 percent of Americans spend less than $500 a year in medical expenses, according to a recent article in the New York Times.

Wal-Mart’s own figures show that 38 percent of the company’s workers spent more than one-sixth of their income on health care last year. During that same period, the company earned $10.5 billion in profit on $285 billion in sales.

Nearly half of the children of the company’s 1.3 million employees in the United States are on Medicaid or have no health insurance at all, according to an internal memo made public by the watchdog group Wal-Mart Watch.

The leaked memo showed Wal-Mart being more concerned with combating critics and bolstering its public image rather than with providing adequate health insurance to its workers.

The memo suggested reframing the Medicaid debate as “everyone’s problem, not just Wal-Mart’s.”

But Wal-Mart is everyone’s problem. According to Wal-Mart Watch, lawmakers in 16 states have shown that the company’s employees top Medicaid rolls. And in Maryland earlier this year, the governor vetoed a bill aimed at Wal-Mart that would have required for-profit companies with more than 10,000 employees in the state to spend 8 percent of their total wages on worker health insurance costs.

Wal-Mart is looking to further shortchange its workers.

In the memo addressed to its board of directors, the company has gone so far as to suggest actions that may prove illegal, such as discouraging unhealthy job applicants and providing benefits aimed at attracting a younger, healthier workforce.

Wal-Mart should fix its own problems, and the government should insist that it abide by the law.

The Labor Department’s inspector general recently criticized officials in the Wage and Hour Division for violating its own policies by promising Wal-Mart 15 days’ notice before inspecting its stores for child labor violations. The Labor Department found 85 such violations involving employees operating dangerous machinery, including cardboard balers and chainsaws at Wal-Mart stores in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Arkansas. In a January settlement, Wal-Mart agreed to pay $135,540 in fines, but denied any wrongdoing.

Everyday low prices are not enough. Treating employees decently counts, too.

Jill Hopke is development director at the Progressive Media Project.