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  3. These are tough times for Wal-Mart, America’s biggest retailer. Long accused of wrecking small-town America and condemned for th

These are tough times for Wal-Mart, America’s biggest retailer. Long accused of wrecking small-town America and condemned for th

admin2011-03-10  42
问题    These are tough times for Wal-Mart, America’s biggest retailer. Long accused of wrecking small-town America and condemned for the stinginess of its pay, the company has lately come under fire for its meanness over employees’ health-care benefits. The charge is arguably unfair: the finn’s health coverage, while admittedly less extensive than the average for big companies, is on a par with other retailers’. But bad publicity, coupled with rising costs, has stirred the Bentonville giant to action. Wal-Mart is making changes that should shift the ground in America’s health-care debate.
   One strategy is to slash the prices of many generic, or out-of-patent, prescription drugs. Wal-Mart recently announced that its Florida stores would sell a list of some 300 generic drugs at $4 for a month’s supply; other states will follow. That is above cost but far less than the prices charged by many pharmacy chains, which get profits from fat margins on generics.
   Wal-Mart’s critics dismiss the move as a publicity stunt. The list of drugs includes only 143 different medicines and excludes many popular generics. True, hut short-sighted. Wal-Mart has transformed retailing by using its size to squeeze suppliers and passing the gains on to consumers. It could do the same with drugs. Target, another big retailer, has already announced that it will match the new pricing. A"Wal-Mart effect" in drugs will not solve America’s health-costs problem: generics account for only a small share of drug costs, which in turn make up only 10% of overall health spending. But it would help.
   The firm’s other initiative is more controversial. Wal-Mart is joining the small but fast-growing group of employers who are controlling costs by shifting to health insurance with high deductibles.
   From January 1st new Wal-Mart employees will only be offered insurance with very low premiums (as little as $11 a month for an individual) but rather high deductibles (excesses): an individual must pay at least the first $1,000 of annual health-care expenses, and on a family plan, the first $3,000. Unusually, Wal-Mart’s plan includes three doctor visits and three prescription drugs before the big deductible kicks in. Since most employees go to the doctor less often than that, the company argues, they will be better off because of the lower premiums. That may be true for the healthy, say critics; sicker workers will see their health costs soar.
   This debate, writ large, is the biggest controversy in American health care today. The Bush administration has been pushing high-deductible plans as the best route to controlling health costs and has encouraged them, with tax-breaks for health-saving accounts. The logic is appealing.  Higher deductibles encourage consumers to become price-conscious for routine care, while insurance kicks in for catastrophic expenses.
   Early evidence suggests these plans do help firms control the cost of health insurance. But critics say that the savings are misleading. They argue that the plans shift costs to sicker workers, discourage preventative care and will anyway do little to control overall health spending, since most of the $2 trillion (a sixth of its entire GDP) that America spends on health care each year goes to people with multiple chronic diseases.
   For the moment, relatively few Americans are covered bv these" consumer-directed"plans. But they are becoming increasingly popular, especially among firms employing low-skilled workers. And now America’s biggest employer has joined the high-deductible trend. That is bound to have an impact.
The phrase" kicks in" (Last line, Paragraph 6) probably means
选项 A、starts to lower health costs.
B、starts to have an effect.
C、starts to push up health cost.
D、starts to offset deductibles.
答案B
解析 语义题。本题所在句子是由while连接的并列句，前后两个分句为对比关系。前面提到较高的减免额可增强消费者在一般性医疗中的价格意识，随后又提及while insurance kicks in for catastrophic expenses。根据前面提到的The logic is appealing可以推断，这里说的是在发生巨额花费时保险又能帮上忙，即生效之意，[B]符合该处语义衔接关系，故为答案。这里说的appealing是指对雇员而言的逻辑，他们只关心自己的花费，至于是降低社会整体的health costs，还是增加heath costs，与个人关系不大，因此排除[A]和[C]；这里没有提到保险可以抵消减免部分，排除[D]。  
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