This morning NPR reported that Walmart was planning to become a major player in healthcare in the United States.
This afternoon Walmart denied the story, saying the document NPR saw was real but “overwritten and incorrect.” Reuters quoted Dr. John Agunobi, president of Walmart U.S. health & wellness as saying, “We are not building a national, integrated, low-cost primary care health care platform.”
My question for Dr. Agunobi and everyone at Walmart is quite simple: why not?
Walmart needs growth. It is one of the biggest companies in the United States but growth has essentially stalled. Healthcare is a huge opportunity.
Importantly, Walmart would be a unique and different player in healthcare: low-cost, super-efficient, reliable, practical and friendly. Walmart could do to healthcare what it has done to retailing, which is to force people to get much better, either differentiating in a meaningful way or cutting costs and prices.
Indeed, Walmart may be the best way to fix the healthcare spending problem in the United States. The company has vast scale, immense financial resources and an aggressive approach.
This is all easier said than done, of course. Healthcare is a complicated world. Selling toothpaste for less is a lot easier than selling MRIs for less.
Still, Walmart needs growth and healthcare is a huge opportunity. And the U.S. needs Walmart to bring some fresh thinking and low prices to healthcare.
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Way too many organizations do not commit to internet promotion coupled with advertisements so they can cleaning open conflict plus deception by a few folk
Adam—-An interesting idea! It certainly was an odd story, so perhaps they were indeed testing the waters.
Tim
Prof. Calkins,
I agree wholeheartedly whith your assesment of Walmart’s opportunity in healthcare. The “urgent care” model is enormously effective and it fits all of Walmart’s core competitive advantages.
So, couldn’t the document have been intentionally leaked as part of a very clever market research initiative? It seems to me that leaking a document and then quickly denying it could be a cheaper, easier, and more effective way to gather a lot of data about public sentiment. Or a way to find out well in advance what groups of people might be adamantly against it.