A few months after opening its own primary care clinics, Walmart is expanding its insurance sales program, in what could be another step toward underwriting.
Walmart is partnering with DirectHealth.com, a broker owned by the company Tranzact, to host insurance enrollment, education and sales sites at more than half of its stores -- an effort to "bring transparency and simplicity to the changing health insurance market," the retail giant said.
The partnership with DirectHealth.com, called Healthcare Begins Here, will bring its online shopping and brokerage services to Walmart stores, with licensed agents that can explain insurance options to consumers and also earn commissions for sales.
Walmart stores have been hosting agents from individual insurers since 2005, but the new program could be a fairly significant expansion as more low- and middle-income individuals come into public exchange markets and more baby boomers shop for Medicare Advantage -- two demographic segments that are among Walmart's 140 million weekly customers.
DirectHealth will be offering plans from 12 different carriers -- including Aetna, Cigna, Humana, UnitedHealthcare and some Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurers -- selling Medicare Advantage and individual plans, including some that can be subsidized via public exchanges.
The program will start on October 1 and will run in stores through early December, coinciding with open enrollment in both public exchanges and Medicare Advantage.
If public exchange website technology doesn't fair much better than last year, consumers may turn to brokers and agents at Walmart and elsewhere as a way to compare -- or even just understand -- different plan networks and benefits.
"For years, our customers have told us that there is too much complexity when it comes to understanding their health insurance options," said Labeed Diab, president of health and wellness at Walmart. "Healthcare Begins Here addresses that complexity by bringing clarity and increased choice to the insurance enrollment process through DirectHealth.com."
Walmart's healthcare ambitions have been the subject of much rumination ever since it opened its first Walmart Care Clinics, in a bid to bring a "new retail price" to primary care: a nurse practitioner consultation for $40 ($4 for Walmart's insured employees) and dozens of low-cost lab tests.
Struggling to keep pace with the likes of Amazon online, Walmart and other retailers may be poised to stake a claim in consumer-driven healthcare and garner business from consumers seeking easy-to-access and low-cost primary care.
For health systems, the emergence of Walmart and other retail clinics means that "the game and competitive factors by which you win primary care business are starting to change," as Lisa Bielamowicz, MD, the chief medical officer at the Advisory Board Company, argues. "If there's a Walmart clinic open 15 hours a day, that's the standard you may have to meet."
For insurance, the emergence Walmart could brings could cause big waves, as Bielamowicz hypothesized:
"What if Walmart expands enough in primary care that it disrupts local, established patient-physician relationships and referral chains, combines clinical, pharmacy and consumer data to create comprehensive patient profiles and then uses that to create a membership model that can drive patient decisions, and then on top of everything, they're able to launch or partner with a nationwide affordable health plan and require aggressive price concessions to participate in their networks?"
Others wonder when Walmart will "cut to the chase" and acquire a large publicly-traded insurer.