45 Million Uninsured Americas: One Proposal

January 6, 2006

Here’s an interesting proposal for extending health insurance to those Americans who lack it: Wal-Mart.

It’s a fair bet that there’s a pretty big overlap between people lacking health insurance and Wal-Mart’s customer base. Clearly, low-income consumers of preventive health care and low-end insurance are underserved in many parts of the country, in much the same way lower-income rural retail consumers were underserved when Sam Walton built his first Wal-Mart in the 1960s.

. . .

Wal-Mart already has a distribution system that delivers goods and services more efficiently than its rivals. And as it grows and expands—and insures more employees—Wal-Mart will certainly learn more about how to acquire medical services or insurance for a large group of people on the cheap.

What’s more, many reformers—particularly those on the right—believe that the key to health-care reform is to have more people and institutions think of insurance or health care as a consumer good, not as a fundamental human right. And who better than Wal-Mart, which sees itself as an agent for consumers, to bring that message to the market?

Finally, no insurer really has the kind of market power that Wal-Mart enjoys. The one entity that does—the federal government—doesn’t use it effectively.

This may not be the answer, but this kind of creative thinking—outside the box brainstorming—is definitely a step in the right direction.