Walmart’s Health Care Services will Cause ‘a Consumer Revolution’ by Abigail Hess / cnbc.com
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n September of 2019, behemoth retailer Walmart announced its goal to become “America’s Neighborhood Health Destination” and launched its first Walmart Health center in Dallas, Georgia. The center offers primary care, labs, X-rays, EKG scans, counseling, dental, optical, hearing and community health education services for cheap. Shoppers can get a medical checkup for $30, a teeth cleaning for $25 and a mental health consultation for $1 a minute, without insurance. For comparison, researchers from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health estimate that the average price of a doctor’s visit for a new uninsured patient is about $160. According to John Sculley, who served as Apple’s CEO from 1983 to 1993 and cur-
rently serves as chairman of pharmacy has not been revolutionized by modern benefit management company RxAdvance, technologies that has transformed every these prices, and the convenience of pro- other big industr y in the United viding healthcare at a well-known location, States,” he notes. is going to cause a “consumer revolution.” According to Sculley, corporate lobbying “We’re going to have a consumer revolu- and necessary regulation are some of the tion in retail for point of care,” Sculley tells reasons health care has been slow to transCNBC Make It. “Why? Because if the Walmart form, estimating that the health care and tests are successful, and I suspect they will pharmaceutical industries spend around be, people will be able to go in and get $154 million and $240 million per year on these kinds of health services at a lower cost political lobbyists, respectively. than if they had health insurance.” According to The Center for Responsive He continues, “Think about that. They’re Politics, the pharmaceutical industry still nearly 30 million people who don’t spends $280 million per year on political have health insurance. A lot of these people lobbying, more on lobbying than any are going to go to a Walmart where you get other industry. these kinds of routine services. That’s going Lobbying is “one of the reasons why the to be a dramatic change.” health-care system in the U.S. is twice as Sculley points out that Walmart is far expensive per-capita as even the most from the only retailer attempting to expensive plans outside the U.S. — the U.K., become the place where patients receive Europe, Singapore, Canada,” says Sculley. their healthcare, listing CVS, Walgreens and “And then you have compliance in health BestBuy as other retailers that are vying to care, which you would expect because be that place. you’re talking about people’s lives. It’s “CVS is probably the furthest along of extremely important. And so the healthanyone,” says Sculley. “They have over 1,300 care industry cannot make mistakes. For of these ‘Minute Clinics’ as they call them, these reasons, the health-care industry has they own one of the largest PBMs (phar- been the last really big industry to adopt macy benefit managers), they own their the kinds of technologies that have comown health insurance company and they pletely transformed telecommunications, own CVS stores.” financial services, retail, and other types of He adds that technology companies are services.” also eyeing the health-care industry space. But Sculley has seen industries over“Big tech companies like HP, Amazon, come these kinds of forces before. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all realize that Prior to serving as the CEO of Apple, this is the largest remaining industry that Sculley was the chief executive at Pepsi. During that time, he remembers observing how mass merchandisers like Walmart, Lowe’s and Kmart disrupted the retail industry and how McDonald’s and Wendy’s disrupted the food and beverage industry. He believes the same disruption is happening in the health-care industry today.
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