Today has started off with a double take at the health policy headlines finding their way to my Google Reader. One stood out in particular — a Reuters newsservice blurb entitled Wal-Mart’s Health Scare. Knowing that it really couldn’t get any worse for the healthcare coverage employees of the venerable big-box bad guy, I was compelled to look further. To my surprise I found out that Wal-Mart is backing Obama’s plans to force employers to provide health insurance to workers. Many a retail lobby in Washington have always opposed such moves. (In fact, the nation’s largest retail lobby is said by many media outlets to be “flabbergasted” by the move.)

Today marks a culmination, of sorts, by the retail giant to come to some brand of compromise with regard to its employees’ healthcare.  Within the past couple of years, after much haggling with labor in the latter’s efforts to unionize Wal-Mart employees, the retailer joined forces with the SEIU (the nation’s largest union) to call for affordable healthcare for all Americans by 2012. What seemed like an olive branch at the time now appears to be part of a concerted strategy by the retailer to not only cover itself on the issue of employer coverage mandates, but also possibly shield itself from more burdensome future coverage requirements by private third party insurers and the relatively low-wage workers it employs at the hands of any pending reform package Congress ultimately passes. Big news, indeed, and a lot of head-scratching on this one, to be sure. | LINK

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