printTo ameliorate the effects of the Obamacare wrecking ball, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is venturing into the business of providing primary health care. For $40, the price of a copay (mine are way more), “you can walk into a Wal-Mart clinic and see a doctor.” It’s “just $4 for Walmart U.S. employees and family members.”
Sandra Fluke: You can have a pregnancy test at Wal-Mart for … $3.00.
Via MarketWatch:
On Friday, a Walmart Care Clinic opened in Dalton, Ga., six months after Walmart U.S., the retailer’s biggest unit, entered the business of providing primary health care. It now operates a dozen clinics in rural Texas, South Carolina and Georgia and has increased its target for openings this year to 17. A … cholesterol test [will cost] $8. A typical retail clinic offers acute care only. But a Walmart Care Clinic also treats chronic conditions such as diabetes. (Walmart U.S. also leases space in its stores to 94 clinics owned by others that set their own pricing.)
“It was very important to us that we establish a retail price in the health-care industry because price leadership matters to us,” said Jennifer LaPerre, a Walmart U.S. senior director responsible for health and wellness, in an interview.
Let the anti-Wal Mart jousting begin.
Typically, critics of Wal Mart—for example, Marian Kester Coombs, writing for The American Conservative—will do nothing to trace the mysterious mechanism by which Wal-Mart is said to impoverish. By offering “the lowest possible prices all the time, not just during sales”? What precisely is the economic process that accounts for Wal-Mart’s ability to “expel jobs and technology from our own country”? Competition? Offering a product people choose to buy?
“Protecting the home market,” which is what TAC writer advocates, is to the detriment of consumers. It forces them to subsidize less efficient local industries, making them the poorer for it. To keep inefficient industries in the lap of luxury, hundreds of others are doomed to shrink or go under.
The writer aforementioned also froths at the mouth over “the teenage girl in Bangladesh … forced to sew pocket flaps onto 120 pairs of pants per hour for 13 cents per hour.” It sounds dreadful. However, the economic reality is this: Wal-Mart is either offering higher, the same or lower wages than the wages workers were earning before its arrival in Bangladesh. The company would find it hard to attract workers if it was paying less, or the same as other companies. Ergo, Wal-Mart is a benefactor that pays the kind of wage unavailable prior to its arrival. More material, if the entrepreneur were forced to pay workers in excess of their productivity, he would eventually have to disinvest. What will the Bangladeshi teenage girl do when that happens?