Health Reform: Wal-Mart Tackles Health Costs and Coverage

The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly reports that Wal-Mart, once widely critiqued for having many uninsured workers, is now seen as an innovator. She writes about how the huge retailer is expanding coverage, trying to control costs, and experimenting with care management programs to improve outcomes and quality. The company still has its critics, naturally, but its efforts also say a lot about what businesses can (or can't) do in the current health care climate:

...Wal-Mart itself warns that in a global market with a weakened economy, it cannot—or will not be able to—accept annual health-care increases of about 8 percent indefinitely.

"It starts to impact us competitively," said Linda Dillman, the company vice president tapped to oversee the health plan.

To Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union and a frequent Wal-Mart critic, the company's health contributions are not commensurate with its financial success. The moral, he said, is that "volunteerism has its limits."

But to Mark Smith, head of the California HealthCare Foundation, an independent nonprofit focused on health-care quality and efficiency, Wal-Mart's experience provides a different lesson.

"Even a company as big and successful as Wal-Mart cannot possibly solve this problem on its own," he said. "There are limits to what one company can do."

 

 

 

 

Additional take-home points from Connolly:

• Wal-Mart shopped around for value, contracting with the Mayo Clinic for all transplant services, for example, based on its excellent record.

• Wal-Mart is utilizing the model of a patient-centered medical home. For its pregnant workers, the company provides a nurse to provide counseling on lifestyle changes and infant care.

• Wal-Mart's low-wage workers are still paying a lot of their income for plans, and many have high deductibles.

• As Smith noted, comprehensive health reform is too big even for even the nation's largest private employer to tackle alone.

(Disclosure: New America is partially funded by the Wal-Mart Foundation, along with other foundations with a variety of perspectives on health system reform.  All support our general approach to creating policy and political space for a bipartisan agreement that will work for all Americans.  A complete list of our funders can be seen here).