Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, said on Tuesday that for the first time in its 46-year history more than half its United States workers had enrolled in the company’s health insurance plan, a milestone for a retailer long criticized as offering unaffordable benefits.
The discount retailer said that after it introduced a revised health plan last fall, the number of workers who signed up reached 690,970, or 50.2 percent of its nearly 1.4 million employees.
The higher enrollment — which has risen from 45.5 percent of Wal-Mart’s employees five years ago — is expected to help blunt criticism from unions and political groups that have rebuked the company for insuring fewer than half of its workers. Wal-Mart’s enrollment now significantly exceeds that of its archrival Target, which provides health insurance to an estimated 40 percent of its work force.
After several years of intensive research and debate within Wal-Mart — including discussions with executives at companies known for generous health care like Starbucks, Pitney Bowes and Microsoft — the chain introduced last fall what was considered its most flexible and generous health plan, effective for the calendar year 2008.
The plan offered deductibles ranging from $350 to $2,000 for individuals. Employees could choose plans with health care “credits” to use for routine care and obtain 2,400 generic prescription drugs for $4 apiece.
Wal-Mart also eliminated fees like $150 monthly for covering a spouse and cut out separate deductibles, like an additional $1,000 for a hospital stay.
A family can pay as little as $250 a year in premiums if it is willing to shoulder a $4,000 deductible and be responsible for as much as $10,000 in medical bills, roughly the same plan that cost $1,500 a few years ago.
“We can see that the improvements we’ve made are being embraced by our associates and their families,” said Linda M. Dillman, the head of benefits at Wal-Mart, which refers to its workers as associates.
Critics still contend the plan is out of reach for many Wal-Mart workers, who earn, on average, less than $20,000 a year. They point to deductibles of up to $2,000 for individuals, about 10 percent of an average Wal-Mart worker’s income.
But thousands of workers have enrolled. Wal-Mart said that 30,000 workers who signed up for its coverage for 2008 were previously uninsured.
One big reason for the uptick: Wal-Mart has reduced the waiting period before a new part-time worker can enroll in its health plan, from two years to one. Target, to cite one example, still requires part-time workers to wait two years.
To date, Wal-Mart said, 92.7 percent of its workers have health care, if not through Wal-Mart then through a spouse’s or parents’ employer, state Medicaid programs, the military or a previous job. The number of workers who are uninsured has fallen to 101,079, or 7.3 percent, in 2008, down from 9.6 percent last year, the company said.
“We still think it’s too high,” Ms. Dillman said, adding that Wal-Mart would commission a study to find out why those 7.3 percent of workers were not enrolled in a plan.
“We really want to understand what is the barrier preventing them from moving onto our plans,” she said.
In a statement, Wal-Mart Watch, a union-financed group critical of the retailer, said it was “surprised that Wal-Mart is proud to report that half its employees choose not to take Wal-Mart’s health care plan, including 7.3 percent who think Wal-Mart’s plan is worse than nothing at all.”