A healthy memo
HERE’S A NEWS STORY A CERTAIN large, Arkansas-based retail concern would love you to read:
Wal-Mart, best known for its efficient management style and its low prices, now offers its employees one of the best healthcare plans in the industry, confounding critics who despise the world’s largest retailer merely because it is successful.
OK, so you won’t be reading that story anytime soon. But not necessarily because it’s wrong. Though its emphasis is skewed, its assertions are defensible. Almost half of all Wal-Mart employees are enrolled in a health insurance plan, compared to 36% of employees in the retail industry as a whole. And Wal-Mart’s executive vice president for benefits recently recommended in a memo that the company make its coverage more “progressive,” an adjective so dangerous it had to be contained in quotes.
Under changes announced last month, Wal-Mart employees can set up healthcare savings accounts, which let them make tax-free contributions to cover their health expenses. The monthly premium for some plans is as low as $11. Employees can get up to three prescriptions a year for only $10 each, and the plan encourages preventive care by establishing a $20 co-payment for initial doctors’ visits.
Of course, these benefits are hardly lavish, and almost a quarter of Wal-Mart employees remain on Medicaid or are uninsured (along with almost half the children of employees). Moreover, Wal-Mart employees spend 8% of their income -- twice the national average -- on healthcare. Many don’t use the company’s coverage because it “is expensive for low-income families.”
How do we know this? Because Wal-Mart itself told us, in that memo from the company’s executive vice president for benefits to Wal-Mart’s board. A draft of the memo was obtained by Wal-Mart Watch, a labor advocacy group that lives up to its name, and the final version was published by the New York Times last month.
Although the memo provides ample ammunition to Wal-Mart’s critics, it also speaks well of the company. The document is as much about spin as it is about substance -- references to a “sustained communication campaign” about Wal-Mart’s generous benefits and the value of “better positioning us to fight Wal-Mart’s critics” show its image-obsessed corporate DNA a little too clearly -- but it also makes some innovative suggestions. It recommends opening in-store health clinics, for example, and giving employees bigger discounts on healthy foods.
The healthcare crisis may be one of the few things in the nation -- along with, say, the oil industry or Jessica Simpson -- that is bigger than Wal-Mart. Or, to quote from the memo, “This is everyone’s problem, not just Wal-Mart’s.”
We don’t mind saying that we agree. After all, just because Wal-Mart says so, that doesn’t make it untrue.
