Original Article at Baltimore Business Journal

As I am reading this article I am thinking to myself, "Gees, these people make no mention of who this will benefit." Granted it will open up more clinics for people to go and get medical attention. But it makes me wonder, who is actually benefiting the most by doing this?

This could go two ways

The first way – It benefits the people by lowering the cost of prescriptions, check ups, vaccinations, and various other medical minor needs.

The second way – It benefits the medical insurers, and ultimately Wal-Mart itself. With a high chance of hurting the doctors that run their own private practices.

Right now there is a decline in the amount of doctors that are graduating and becoming fully certified in America. In the next coming years this will become painfully obvious, and a growing problem. In most cases it will be a nurse who would do more of the work, instead of a doctor at clinics like these.

When this plan kicks off it would make those late night visits to the emergency center a lot less crowded. I know several times I have been there around other people with minor things, but they have no other places to go. So they crowd the emergency area waiting for the next available doctor on call. Thus taking away time that could be spent really helping people in critical need of help.

I have heard from parents, where they have taken their kids in for emergency visits at night because the kid has a painful ear ache. First the parents and the child end up waiting for a long time to get medical attention, then they receive this large bill for the visit. Having a place to go to at night that doesn’t charge a lot and is made specifically for visits like this is a great concept.

Now let’s examine the so called price reduction of Wal-Mart doing this. As the article says, thanks to Wal-Mart, the cost of prescriptions dropped by 50% or more by introducing generic prescriptions.

Sounds like this might work in our favor, right?

With the sky rocketing Non-insured people in the United States, this could be a blessing to many. But there is another side of coin for those who have medical coverage. For people like myself with medical coverage who pay co-pay for their prescriptions. I usually don’t see the true cost of a prescription. I certainly know that my medical insurance rate has never decreased. Truth be told, if it did ever decrease, I would head outside and look for flying farm animals, pigs, cows, etc.

This leads me to the next part of this article.
Benefits for medical insurers and Ultimately Wal-Mart

With the use of Wal-Mart clinics, medical insurers will be able to cut the cost of having to pay emergency medical expenses. The cost of paying for a prescription will be a lot less for them. So now their bottom line is dropping and since they have no plans of lowering insurance cost, well this means more profit for them. I wouldn’t be surprised to see in the near future all medical insurance plans allow the use of Wal-Mart clinics. This of course would drive more profit to Wal-Mart. From the past I can say with confidence that Wal-Mart tries to get as much business and profit that it can. What can I say; this is the core of big business.

The more I think about this article, I can guarantee they came up with the idea after they were being forced to improve the medical coverage for their employees. They did what we all do when we are looking for insurance coverage. We look around and then find it to be insanely expensive and shutter at the price. So as Wal-Mart was analyzing the insurance plans I am sure it went something like this. Board member says, "If you look at the amount of money they make by offering some type of medical attention, it’s astounding!” Board member 2 says, "Wow, we really need to get in to this business. Here we thought making billions of dollars in retail was great, look at this market.” So a few months later we see an article like this come up. 

Doctors with Private Practices

The true damage that may come from this will be found in the private sector of the medical industry. It will essentially take a lot of profit away from the doctors who run their own practices. It will do what it did to all the other smaller businesses that were in the areas around Wal-Mart when it came in. That is, it put them out of business.

The Medical Day to Day minor things that happen to people is a major part of the income for private practices. With Wal-Mart introducing a clinic that appears to be cheaper for people to go and get help. They no longer need to go see their family doctor for most of their aliments. It’s all comes down to a persons budget, and we make choices based upon how much money we have. I do believe that this loss of income will fuel the loss of doctors graduating. I mean, what will they have to look forward to when they leave college? A job at Wal-Mart Clinics, how exciting!

See this Video for a good example. Big Box Mart

Right now Wal-Mart is toting it as a great thing for people and it will save them money. It may very well be a good concept with the growing amount of people who don’t have medical coverage. But we really need to be aware of what could and most likely will happen. It could very much be just a Wal-Mart Roll-Back pricing service for health insurance companies.

Original Article at Baltimore Business Journal