Walmart Wants to Help You Sign Up for Obamacare, But Not Its Employees

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/313-17/26286-walmart-wants-to-help-you-sign-up-for-obamacare-but-not-its-employees

So this fall, during the open enrollment period for Medicare and Obamacare’s marketplaces, Walmart will partner with the insurance site DirectHealth.com to help shoppers compare their different enrollment options. Citing research from the Kaiser Family Foundation that shows up to 60 percent of people are confused about their health insurance choices, Diab says that there’s a real opportunity for Walmart to bring more transparency to the process. Agents from DirectHealth.com will be available to help customers enroll in government plans either online or over the phone.

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But insurance benefits have actually been a source of controversy for Walmart over the past several years, at least when it comes to the type of health care options available to the company’s own employees. In 2006, after public backlash over the fact that many of Walmart’s low-wage workers couldn’t afford its benefits, the chain expanded its health plan to cover more part-time employees. But in 2012, the company contracted its insurance benefits again, shifting its employees back onto the Medicaid program and Obamacare’s new private plans.

At the time, health policy experts agreed that Walmart was taking advantage of the new law to trim its costs and continue offering skimpy plans. “The packages Walmart is providing for low-income people aren’t offering very much coverage except for catastrophes. It’s likely they’ll be better off going with a government-sponsored plan,” Linda Blumberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told the Huffington Post.

Due to the low wages and scarce benefits extended to Walmart’s workers, most of them end up relying on government assistance programs to make ends meet. One analysis found that the workers at a single 300-person Supercenter store rely on anywhere from $904,542 to $1,744,590 in public benefits per year, partly because of the employees covered under Medicaid.

[Sherman A1]

1. Wal Mart

The corporate Welfare Queen!