Wal-Mart Finally Wins Approval of Its Employee Health Plan: Retailer Says More Than 50 Percent of Staffers Have Signed Up for Benefits Package

Wal-Mart said this week that for the first time in its 45-year history more than half of its workers had enrolled in the company's health insurance plan, a potent milestone for a retailer long associated with unaffordable benefits. The discount retailer said that, after it introduced a revised health plan last fall, the number of workers who signed up reached 690,970, or 50.2 percent of its 1.4 million employees, the NY Times reports. The higher enrollment — which has risen from 45.5 percent of Wal-Mart's employees five years ago — is expected to help blunt criticism from unions and political groups that have focused, relentlessly, on the company's failure to insure fewer than half its workers.

After several years of research and discussion, including interviews with executives at companies known for generous healthcare, like Starbucks, Pitney Bowes and Microsoft, Wal-Mart last fall introduced what was considered its most flexible, and generous, health plan. A family can pay as little as $250 a year in premiums if it is willing to have a $4,000 deductible and be responsible for as much as $10,000 in medical bills, roughly the same plan that cost them $1,500 a few years ago, reports Times writer Michael Barbaro. "We can see that the improvements we've made are being embraced by our associates and their families," Linda Dillman, the head of benefits at Wal-Mart, which refers to its workers as associates, told the Times.

Critics still contend the plan is out of reach for many Wal-Mart workers, who earn, on average, less than $20,000 a year. But thousands of workers have enrolled. Wal-Mart said that 30,000 workers who enrolled for 2008 were previously uninsured. To date, Wal-Mart said, 92.7 percent of its workers have healthcare, it not through Wal-Mart, then through a spouses' or parents' employer, state Medicaid programs, the military or a previous job. The number of workers who are uninsured has fallen, to 7.3 percent in 2008 from 9.6 percent last year, the company said.

Dillman said Wal-Mart would commission a study to find out why those 7.3 percent of workers were not enrolled in a health plan. "We really want to understand what is the barrier preventing them from moving onto our plans," she told the Times.

In a statement, Wal-Mart Watch, a union-financed group critical of the retailer, said it was "surprised that Wal-Mart is proud to report that half its employees choose not to take Wal-Mart's health care plan, including 7.3 percent who think Wal-Mart's plan is worse than nothing at all."

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