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Walmart's Better Care Services: Its Version of One Medical or a Completely Different Bet?

  • Writer: Mike Rawaan
    Mike Rawaan
  • 16 minutes ago
  • 8 min read

July 08, 2026  |  Consumer Health, Digital Health

Mike Rawaan, Founder and Managing Director


Two years ago, I wrote Walmart's healthcare obituary. I was wrong about one thing: it wasn't an obituary. It was more of a demolition permit. In May 2024, when Walmart announced it would shut down all 51 Walmart Health locations and kill its virtual care arm, I argued the retail giants had fallen for the "if you build it, they will come" fallacy - launching clinics without validating product-market fit, underestimating what it costs to run a healthcare clinic in America, never answering the basic questions: where, when, and why do people actually get care, and does your brand earn you the right to deliver it? I dove deeper on those failure modes in my presentation, Why Has Retail Health Failed to Deliver? The diagnosis held up. Walgreens wrote down billions on VillageMD. CVS retrenched. The retail clinic land grab ended in write-offs.


In spite of filing Walmart under "failed healthcare experiments", I have kept an eye on them. Because one should always watch what Walmart does and one should never give up on Walmart. Walmart spent the last two years building something structurally different and this time, the model aligns with the company.



What Walmart Actually Built

In January 2026, Walmart launched Better Care Services, a digital platform that connects customers to a curated network of third-party telehealth (Teladoc) providers for urgent care and behavioral health such as Doctor on Demand, BetterHelp, Curai Health, and Wheel. Walmart has also inked an agreement with Eli Lilly for direct access to LillyDirect. After the virtual visit, the prescription and OTC basket route through Walmart's pharmacy and delivery infrastructure, which is free for Walmart+ members. Walmart opened with a $15 discount on select telehealth visits.


In April, Walmart expanded the platform into weight management: telehealth prescribing of FDA-approved GLP-1s (no compounded products), dietitian services, AI-supported coaching, metabolic monitoring. Initial visits start at $99, check-ins at $35, and requires no subscription. And this month, as the CMS Medicare GLP-1 Bridge went live on July 1 with its $50 beneficiary copay, Walmart and Sam's Club rolled out a nationwide navigation program: one-on-one pharmacist consultations helping seniors understand eligibility and coverage pathways.


Underneath all of it sits the asset Walmart never abandoned: roughly 4,600 pharmacies, ~15,000 pharmacists, a footprint within 10 miles of about 90% of Americans, and a presence in roughly 4,000 medically underserved communities. Add Everyday Health Signals, the opt-in AI tool that reads your shopping behavior and steers your cart toward healthier choices, and the Nutrition Hub that auto-fills your grocery cart from a recipe.

The Strategy, Stated Plainly

Walmart is no longer trying to be a healthcare provider. It is building the fulfillment layer of American healthcare, which makes a lot of sense given their expertise in logistics in the retail space.


In 2024, Walmart owned the clinics, employed the clinicians, carried the malpractice exposure, and ate the fixed costs - and their primary care offering could not cover the rent. In 2026, third parties carry the clinical risk, the licensure, and the labor cost. Walmart owns what it has always owned: The transaction. The prescription fill. The delivery. The grocery basket that follows the diagnosis. Every telehealth visit on the platform terminates in a Walmart cart.


Walmart stopped trying to run an airline and decided to run the airport. Carriers come and go, routes change, someone else absorbs the operational risk, but every passenger walks through your terminal and buys from your concessions. The old Walmart Health was measured in revenue per square foot, and with today's reimbursement model, primary care will lose that fight every time. Better Care Services is measured in marginal cost per referral, and the referral feeds the highest-traffic pharmacy and grocery network in the country.


That's not a healthcare strategy retrofitted onto a retailer. That's a retail strategy finally aimed correctly at healthcare.


Policy Headwinds & Tailwinds

Tailwinds first. The policy environment of 2026 is practically underwriting this model.

The Medicare GLP-1 Bridge puts certain GLP-1s in reach of Part D beneficiaries at a $50 copay from July 1, 2026 through the end of 2027, paid through a central processor outside the Part D benefit, which then reimburses the pharmacies at wholesale acquisition cost plus a dispensing fee. Walmart positioned itself as the navigation desk for that program before it launched. The administration's most-favored-nation deals with Lilly and Novo, plus the TrumpRx platform, have normalized cash-pay pharmacy at a national scale. Washington just taught 330 million Americans to shop for drugs the way they shop for televisions. Nobody is better built for that behavior than Walmart.


Then there's coverage disruption. With enhanced ACA premium tax credits expired, average premium payments more than doubled. Roughly 9% of 2025 marketplace enrollees are now uninsured, and projections put 2026 coverage losses near 4.8 million people, and that's before OBBBA's Medicaid work requirements and eligibility churn fully bite. That's a brutal outcome for American families, which I've written about it in my OBBBA coverage. But strategically, it manufactures exactly the customer Better Care Services was designed for: cash-pay, price-sensitive, and priced out of the traditional front door. A $99 telehealth visit and a $4 generic look very different when your deductible tripled or your coverage disappeared.


Now the Headwinds. The same forces can work against Walmart. WAC-plus-dispensing-fee reimbursement on Bridge fills is volume economics, not margin economics. Manufacturer direct-to-consumer channels - LillyDirect, TrumpRx - sit one strategic decision away from disintermediating retail pharmacy entirely; today Walmart integrates with them, tomorrow they may not need a middleman. And the households losing Medicaid and marketplace coverage are disproportionately Walmart's core customers. KFF found over half of returning marketplace enrollees are cutting spending on food and clothing to afford healthcare. That money comes out of Walmart's registers too. You can't fully monetize a customer whose wallet just emptied.


The Consumer Is Meeting Walmart Halfway

Every meaningful consumer health trend of the past 24 months bends toward this model. Patients increasingly behave like shoppers: transparent prices, same-day access, cash-pay when insurance friction gets in the way. GLP-1 demand has become the front door to healthcare engagement for millions, and Walmart's own CEO noted as far back as 2023 that GLP-1 customers change what's in their baskets.


Telehealth has consolidated around marketplace models rather than owned clinical staff. Amazon ran the same play after shuttering Amazon Care. AI-driven personalization has moved from novelty to expectation, and Walmart's Everyday Health Signals turns two decades of purchase data into a health engagement asset no health system can replicate. And with pharmacies closing across the country - often in the vulnerable communities where Walmart is the last pharmacy standing - the pharmacist is becoming the most accessible clinician in America.


Walmart vs. Amazon: Same Playbook, Opposite Bets

The lazy comparison says Walmart and Amazon are running the same play. They aren't. Go back to the airport analogy: Walmart decided to run the airport. Amazon, after shutting down Amazon Care, went out and bought an airline - One Medical - for $3.9 billion and kept the airport too.


Walmart (Better Care Services)

Amazon (One Medical + Amazon Pharmacy)

Core model

Marketplace: curates third-party providers; owns the transaction, not the care

Owned delivery: employs clinicians via One Medical; owns the care and the transaction

Physical care footprint

None — closed all 51 clinics in 2024

~200 One Medical offices, expanding via health system partnerships (e.g., Hackensack Meridian)

Virtual care

Third-party network (Doctor on Demand, BetterHelp, Curai Health, Wheel); same-day urgent care and behavioral health

On-Demand Care from $29 (message) / $49 (video); 24/7 virtual care included with membership

Membership

None required; Walmart+ adds free Rx delivery

One Medical: $99/yr for Prime members, $199/yr standalone

GLP-1 / weight management

Third-party prescribing + LillyDirect; initial visits from $99, check-ins $35; FDA-approved only; Medicare GLP-1 Bridge navigation via pharmacists

GLP-1 Management Program embedded in primary care; cash-pay from ~$149/mo oral, ~$299/mo injectable; 24/7 renewals from $29

Pharmacy assets

~4,600 stores, ~15,000 pharmacists; within 10 miles of ~90% of Americans; ~4,000 underserved communities

Mail-order + in-clinic kiosks; same-day delivery in ~3,000 cities, targeting ~4,500 by end of 2026; $5/mo generics subscription for Prime

AI layer

Everyday Health Signals (shopping-data nutrition guidance), Nutrition Hub

Health AI agent (booking, renewals, records) + Health Insights lab interpretation

Clinical risk

Carried by partners

Carried by Amazon

Target customer

Cash-pay, price-sensitive, rural and underserved

Prime households, urban/suburban, digitally native

The last three rows of this table sum up the strategy divergence. Amazon is betting that owning longitudinal primary care - the clinician relationship, the record, the outcomes - builds a moat worth its cost structure. It's integrating GLP-1s into an ongoing care relationship, not a transaction, and wiring an AI agent into the medical record. That's a deeper product. It's also a bet Walmart already made once, at 51 locations, and paid tuition on.


Walmart is betting that breadth (actually, reach) beats depth. Amazon's same-day pharmacy delivery will hit ~4,500 cities by year-end; Walmart already stands within 10 miles of 90% of the country, staffed with the one clinician Americans still see face-to-face without an appointment.


One Medical can't serve a Medicaid-only patient outside D.C.; Walmart's whole model is built for the customer that Amazon's membership economics screen out. These companies aren't fighting over the same patient. Amazon is monetizing the insured, app-native household. Walmart is monetizing everyone policy just pushed out of the system.


Will it succeed or fail? Let's make that question precise.


As a healthcare delivery disruptor: it will fail, because it isn't trying. Walmart owns no clinical outcomes, manages no total cost of care, and holds no panel. If a Better Care Services partner delivers mediocre medicine, Walmart's exposure is reputational, not financial. This platform will not bend the cost curve, and nobody should pretend it will.


As a commerce strategy: I expect it to succeed, and durably. The unit economics that killed Walmart Health - fixed costs, clinical labor, revenue per square foot - are no longer part of the equation. What remains is a near-zero-marginal-cost referral engine bolted onto the country's largest pharmacy and grocery footprint, launched at the precise moment federal policy is pushing millions of Americans toward cash-pay healthcare and subsidized GLP-1 access.


In 2024, Walmart learned the most expensive lesson in retail health: you can't out-hospital the hospitals or out-PG the Physicians Groups. In 2026, it's applying the oldest lesson in retail: own the shelf, not the factory. In the end, Walmart didn't leave healthcare. It just stopped paying healthcare's rent.


Sources, Citations, and Further Reading

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