Wal-Mart At It Again

Excerpts from a TomPaine.com article Wal-Mart's Benefits Squeeze, by Cindy Zeldin,

Wal-Mart's health insurance options for 2007, dubbed the "value plan" and the "freedom plan," feature deductibles reaching as high as $6,000 for family coverage under the "freedom plan"—meaning that a Wal-Mart employee selecting that plan would have to fork over $6,000 before insurance started covering their family's medical bills. That's a lot of money for a cashier earning Wal-Mart wages, and it begs some serious questions about how a deductible that high can be met without going into debt.

Shoot, I couldn't afford a $6,000 a year deductible

In a backdoor way, Wal-Mart's strategy is to do what many insurers have always done: get into the game of cherry-picking. Insurance companies have long been aware that one of the best ways to turn a profit is to enroll people with low health risk. Large nationwide employers, however, have never really been in the game of hiring workers based on health status. Typically, ability to perform the job in question is the deciding factor, making Wal-Mart's entry into the cherry-picking game revolutionary. And as the nation's largest private employer, Wal-Mart's employee benefit decisions will reverberate throughout the economy.

Like everything Wal-Mart does, it casts the largest shadow.

By offering high deductible policies instead of eliminating coverage altogether, Wal-Mart can still say to its critics that it is providing a benefit that works well enough for most of its employees, and technically, they will be right. But future health isn't always predictable, and the slice of WalMart workers who will fare poorly under the new plan are the very ones who will end up actually needing to use their insurance. After all, while many medical expenses are predictable, many are not—that's part of the reason we have insurance in the first place. And for those workers or their family members with unanticipated health expenses—those who become pregnant, are in a serious accident, or have children who are diagnosed with a chronic condition—well, they won't just be slightly worse off. They'll likely end up in a sea of medical debt.