Wal-Mart Goes Into Health Care At the Store

The New York Times reports:

Everyday low prices on strep-throat exams.


That is the basic idea behind a retail approach to routine medical care now catching on among consumers and entrepreneurs. At Wal-Mart, CVS and other chain stores, walk-in health clinics are springing up as an antidote to the expense and inconvenience of full-service doctors' offices or the high-cost and impersonal last resort of emergency rooms.

For a $30 flu shot, a $45 treatment for an ear infection or other routine services from a posted price list, patients can visit nurse practitioners in independently operated clinics set up within the stores — whose own pharmacies can fill prescriptions.

"It was a lot easier to know you can just drive up the block to a clinic, rather than spend time in the pediatrician's waiting room," said Liz Lyons, who recently took her 9-year-old son to have a sore throat swabbed in a clinic at a CVS drugstore in Bethesda, Md.

Just think, those areas that don't like Big Box stores seem to like limiting health care options for the poor.What other conclusion can you reach? Blue America.