An Experiment in Scotch

The busi­ness world is slightly ker­fluffled this morn­ing con­cern­ing Wal­Mart announc­ing that they fully sup­port Pres­i­dent Obama’s health­care ini­tia­tive that would require employ­ers to pro­vide health insur­ance for all employ­ees. Of course, if you look at this from WalMart’s view, this makes total sense. The peo­ple who run the com­pany aren’t dum­mies which is appar­ent when you con­sider the suc­cess of Wal­Mart through the years.

They know change is prob­a­bly com­ing re: health­care and it’s their job to fig­ure out how best to deal with that change. The best way for them to deal with it is to have every­one else have to deal with it in exactly the same way so that they (Wal­Mart) can uti­lize their econ­omy of scale to make it cheaper and more effi­cient for them thus rein­forc­ing their com­pet­i­tive advan­tage over their competitors.

They’ve already rev­o­lu­tion­ized health care once in a far more sweep­ing and mean­ing­ful way than Obama could ever hope to when they insti­tuted the $4 monthly pre­scrip­tion and the $10 90 day pre­scrip­tion. Few peo­ple rec­og­nize this and most lib­eral peo­ple who hate Wal­Mart would never admit it but when they rolled out this pro­gram, it effec­tively changed the health care land­scape because peo­ple could get their pre­scrip­tions for a rea­son­able price. This is exactly what we’d hope would hap­pen in a free market.

Of course, Obama doesn’t want a free-market health care sys­tem and instead would pre­fer the gov­ern­ment, not known for doing any­thing par­tic­u­larly well or effi­ciently (see: Medicare, Social Secu­rity, et al) pro­vide health care for every­one. Wal­Mart, sens­ing a com­ing change in the polit­i­cal land­scape, is posi­tion­ing them­selves to fully reap the reward of the gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion. This is a genius move and I look for­ward to more com­pa­nies look­ing for ways to make money and cre­ate com­pet­i­tive advan­tage on the back of the New World Order.