A tip of our hat is in order to the two members of the New York City Council who had the courage to stand up yesterday and vote against the legislation we dubbed the Higher Priced Groceries and Minority Unemployment Act. They are Simcha Felder of Brooklyn and Andrew Lanza of Staten Island.

Forty other council members voted in favor of the legislation, enough to override Mayor Bloomberg’s veto. But the session yesterday and the comments of the council members only underscored how poorly thought out is the effort to force grocery stores of a certain size in the city to spend about $2.75 an hour on health care for their employees. As our Jill Gardiner reports at page one today, it finally dawned on at least a few of the Council members yesterday that the additional cost might cause some barely profitable supermarkets serving poor or minority communities to close their doors. Instead of finding themselves with new company paid health insurance, the employees at those markets might find themselves out of jobs, and the customers of those markets might find themselves out of luck.

Rather than torpedoing the legislation entirely, however, the new concerns have the council thinking of making a change to the requirements – imposing the onerous health-care spending regulations only on markets of say, 50 employees and 20,000 square feet. The legislation as passed has a threshold of 35 employees and 10,000 square feet. At this rate, the law, touted by its proponents as the Health Care Security Act, should be renamed the Supermarket Size and Employment Limitation Act. A supermarket owner sure is going to think twice before hiring that 50th employee or expanding into the additional space next door if doing so will trigger a massive health-care bill and intrusive government regulations.

The contortions of the lawmakers make more and more clear that their actions are aimed at a specific company, Wal-Mart, whose relentless cost cutting in every area of its operations has made its everyday low prices possible. Those, in turn, have made the company an American success story.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that the same day the City Council was maneuvering against Wal-Mart, our Pia Catton had a column in the Sun reporting on the millions of dollars that Nancy Walton Laurie has invested in a dance studio and theater in Chelsea for the Cedar Lake Dance Ensemble. Wal-Mart’s profits, in other words, are being reinvested in New York in ways that go far beyond simply the cost savings accrued by New Yorkers who do their shopping at the chain’s outlets in New Jersey and Long Island.

Wal-Mart’s opponents say they are simply trying to prevent the company from freeloading on taxpayers for the medical care of its employees. But that’s a bogus charge, given the company last year collected more than $11.2 billion in state and local sales taxes and insured more than 948,000 people.

It’s all enough to make a shopper wish the City Council would solve the problems of the uninsured in a way that didn’t involve meddling with the personnel policies of the supermarket business.