Wal-Mart (Finally) Moves to Expand Health Care for Employees; Much More Still to Do

PlanSponsor.com is reporting this morning that Wal-Mart is loosening eligibility requirements for part-timers for purposes of health insurance.

Whereas part-timers previously had to work for Wal-Mart for two years before becoming eligible for coverage, now they'll only need to work one year. This will allow an additional 150,000 employees to sign up for health-coverage.

In addition, Wal-Mart is reducing a number of prescription co-pays from $10 to $3.

Both simple, affordable moves for the retail behemoth. One wonders why it took so long to implement these necessary changes. 

One also wonders whether these changes were due to the large number of Wal-Mart bills sweeping state legislatures right now which would require Wal-Mart to pay a larger percentage of their payroll costs on health insurance.

Finally, all is still not well if you are a rank-and-file Wal-Mart worker seeking health insurance. According to the story in PlanSponsor.com:

The [current] version of the health plan that the company expected most employees to sign up for would be available for $23 a month and workers' children would be included for $15 more.

However, the coverage also calls for a deductible that requires the worker to pick up the first $1,000 in medical expenses, and the deductible rises to a maximum of $3,000 for families.

Clearly, the next thing Wal-Mart needs to change to make health care truly affordable for its workforce are these astronomically high deductibles.

PS