WalMart is ramping up its Washington activity to push for comprehensive health care reform, and the world's largest retailer says it is ready to use its economic muscle to get out in front and influence the discussion.
"We're willing to take a stand independently and not just do it through our associations," said Linda Dillman, the retail giant's executive vice president of benefits, who was in town last week with a posse of Wal-Mart employees bending ears on Capitol Hill.
Long a target of complaints from labor, environmental and health care activists, Wal-Mart has been trying to rehabilitate its reputation in recent years by going green in its stores and becoming more employee-friendly. For instance, the company has begun offering employees a broader range of low-cost insurance options and, as part of its health care reform campaign, is pushing for greater use of electronic medical records - and helping doctors pay for the upgrade.
The company began its congressional outreach last summer with regular Washington visits, and its officials and employees have dropped in on about 75 lawmakers' offices since then. Chief Executive Mike Duke has talked with both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, according to Dillman. And last week, Dillman gave a keynote speech to the National Business Group on Health, which represents large employers in the health care debate.
To introduce themselves to policymakers, Wal-Mart executives explain how the company has provided better health care to its 1.4 million employees by offering plans that cost between $5 and $200 per month and provide a range of coverage. The expanded options boosted by 10 percent the number of employees enrolled, Dillman said, and now a little over half of Wal-Mart's employees are covered.
"We're doing our share to offer a good plan, an inexpensive plan to our associates so they'll take that option," she said.
Even the Service Employees International Union, which has had sharp differences with Wal-Mart in the past, has nice things to say.
"As the largest private corporation, they do have the ability to set a standard to providing good jobs with good health care," said SEIU spokeswoman Lori Lodes. "Right now they are at the table, and they have a very strong commitment to reforming our health care system."
Wal-Mart and SEIU are partners in a coalition of business and labor groups pushing for better health care.
Wal-Mart has been criticized in the past because many of its employees and their families were uninsured or covered by government-provided health insurance. But Dillman said only 3 percent of the company's employees are now on state assistance.
The company is also pushing for increased use of electronic medical records. Wal-Mart recently announced it would offer a health information technology package to doctors for $25,000 - about half the price of technology now on the market - through its Sam's Club warehouses. The move comes on the heels of the $19 billion Congress approved in the stimulus bill to help doctors move to electronic records.
Small-business voice gets louder
A small-business advocacy group is hawking a message that's not normally heard on Capitol Hill: Small-business owners support health care reform, even though it might require them to offer insurance or pay into the system.
Small Business Majority was founded four years ago with a simple goal, according to its website, "solving the single-biggest problem facing America's 27 million small businesses: affordable and accessible health care." And its chief executive, John Arensmeyer, says research and polling shows that small-business owners are willing to be part of a solution that requires small business to play or pay.
"We're trying to make sure that policymakers understand how critical getting health care reform is for small business and how our health care crisis is killing small business," Arensmeyer said. "Most small business is willing and prepared to be part of a solution that involves shared responsibility of all stakeholders."
That message runs counter to the National Federation of Independent Business, which opposes a play-or-pay model. NFIB has been viewed for decades as the voice of small business in Washington.
And that's part of the reason Arensmeyer said he launched his group.
"I ran a business for many years, and it didn't seem to me they were representing much of what I was seeing day to day," he said, noting that NFIB opposed health care reform in the early 1990s.
Arensmeyer said his nonprofit, nonpartisan group comes without ideological baggage and has positions backed up by data. The group has nine staff members, and its approximately $1 million budget is funded by foundations, he said.
NFIB spokeswoman Stephanie Cathcart said her group's surveys and polling show small businesses oppose a play-or-pay system.
"We oppose an employer mandate, and [play or pay] generally is the same as a tax on business," she said. "It's a job killer."
And she said that NFIB, now in its sixth decade, also has been making a data-driven case against play or pay.
"We've always been the voice of small business. We've always taken a research process that polls beyond our membership," she said.
A common enemy
When it comes to health care reform, there has been a rift on the left between the single-payer and public-private advocates, so last week offered a rare opportunity to see both sides coming together in common cause: to bash insurance companies.
The two sides teamed up to protest a policy forum at a Washington Ritz-Carlton sponsored by America's Health Insurance Plans, a national association representing more than 1,300 companies that provide health insurance.
But don't expect a marriage anytime soon between the single-payer groups, which believe reforms short of abolishing health insurance companies will fail, and public-private supporters, which are pushing for tighter controls on insurance companies and the creation of a public insurance plan option.
"I'd say it was a concurrent event. It doesn't mean there was any kind of merger there," said single-payer advocate Chuck Idelson, spokesman for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the nation's largest nurses union.
Public-private advocate Jacki Schechner of Health Care for America Now put it another way: "Let's just say that if we were in a relationship, our Facebook status would be, 'It's complicated,'" she joked.
As for the insurance industry?
"We were really pleased that our policy conference brought people together from across the spectrum for a productive policy discussion," AHIP spokesman Mike Tuffin said, noting that Republican Sen. Orrin G. Hatch and President Barack Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, both attended.
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