Whatever the company's motive, retail behemoth Wal-Mart Stores Inc. made healthcare reform significantly more likely last week by throwing its weight behind a requirement that all employers provide health coverage.
The company made its position known in a letter to President Obama, who has said an employer mandate is vital to helping cover the roughly 46 million people in the United States who lack medical insurance.
Although it wasn't in the letter, Wal-Mart also says it supports a mandate for all uninsured people to buy reasonably priced coverage -- another key element of the healthcare debate.
"It's pretty clear that we're advocating for reform," Greg Rossiter, a company spokesman, told me. "We've said for some time that we support healthcare reform. It needs to be comprehensive and it needs to happen."
If those remarks caused you to do a double take, you're not alone.
This is Wal-Mart, right? The same company that's drawn fire from unions and municipalities for not providing sufficient coverage to its own 1.4 million U.S. workers?
The same company that just a few years ago was fighting aggressively against similar proposals at the state level?
"Wal-Mart has been working hard to improve its image on healthcare," said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a Washington think tank. "They've moved from being a bad guy to a good guy."
That was the consensus among various healthcare experts I spoke with. While none could say for sure what Wal-Mart's motive may be, there was general agreement that whatever the company is up to, its contribution to the reform debate is a positive one.
"This blows a hole in business opposition to reform efforts," said Judy Feder, a Georgetown University public policy professor who also serves as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The center's president, John Podesta, who helped lead Obama's transition team after the election, joined Wal-Mart Chief Executive Mike Duke in submitting last week's letter to the White House.
Also signing the letter was Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, which has been at odds with Wal-Mart in the past but is aligned with the company on healthcare issues.
When I pressed Rossiter on the company's motive for embracing healthcare mandates, he insisted that Wal-Mart has always recognized a need for overhauling the healthcare system.
