Wal-Mart offers to help fix US health care
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc., at the center of debate over corporate responsibility for health care, said on Tuesday that it wants to use its cost-cutting expertise to help make the U.S. health care system more efficient.
Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, has become a lightning rod for labor unions, environmentalists, anti-sprawl groups and others who contend that the retailer pays poverty-level wages, pushes employees onto government-funded Medicaid health insurance, and devours green space for its massive stores.
Maryland recently passed legislation that requires Wal-Mart to spend more on employee health care, and similar bills have been proposed in dozens of other states as they try to defray rising costs.
The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer, the largest U.S. private sector employer, has been taking steps to change such negative perceptions, including adding a lower-priced health care plan for employees, but so far the efforts have done little to quiet critics.
At the start of the retailer’s second annual media conference here on Tuesday, top executives spoke on issues ranging from health care to fashion, but one of Wal-Mart’s most vocal critics—Wake Up Wal-Mart, a union-backed group—held its own press event at the same hotel, where a handful of Wal-Mart employees called on the company to provide better pay and benefits.
“Maybe, if you could live a day in the life of an average Wal-Mart associate, you would understand the fear we have of getting sick because we can’t afford health care, or how hard it is to support a family on Wal-Mart’s wages,” the employees wrote in a letter to Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott.
Wal-Mart said health care is a national problem and required a joint effort from government, corporations and workers to find ways to make the system more efficient.
The retailer said the key is to figure out what is driving up health care costs—just as Wal-Mart does with its vaunted supply chain network—and then wring inefficiencies out of the system.
Wal-Mart tracks expenses so closely that cardboard boxes at its distribution centers bear a message reminding employees that each box costs the company 75 cents.
The retailer offered up its information technology expertise to help develop a system for keeping electronic medical records as another means of reducing costs.
Wal-Mart also said that lessons could be learned from health clinics it is opening in dozens of stores around the country, many of which serve uninsured patients who would otherwise go to the emergency room—a major drain on health care resources.
The conference continues on Wednesday, with speeches from CEO Scott and other executives.
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