On August 18, SCAN Health Plan and Costco announced an expanded partnership to put co-branded Medicare products in market. On September 16, SCAN and Walmart announced a co-branded Medicare Advantage plan of their own. Two of the largest retailers in the country picked the same partner within four weeks, and the partner is a nonprofit serving roughly 460,000 members across 33 counties in six states rather than one of the national carriers.
Neither partnership has regulatory approval yet, neither company has named the states involved, and neither has stated a plan year. Nothing described below is available to a member today, and the companies have said they are limited in what they are able to disclose while the products await agency review.
What each announcement puts on the table
The Costco partnership covers co-branded Medicare Advantage products in two states and a Medicare supplement product in a third, with the three target markets holding roughly five million Medicare enrollees between them. SCAN described potential offerings including a rebuilt pharmacy experience, Medflex over-the-counter benefits, vision, and audiology, all pending regulatory review. Costco called it the company's first comprehensive partnership with a Medicare plan.
The Walmart partnership covers a co-branded Medicare Advantage plan in two states, and the release says the plan is expected to be available to more than two million Medicare enrollees, which describes the eligible population in those markets rather than a membership target. The potential offerings named there include pharmacy, vision, food benefits, over-the-counter products, and Everyday Health Signals, Walmart's wellness platform, alongside nutrition coaching drawn from shopping data for members who opt in. Those offerings carry the same pending-approval caveat.
Read together, the two deals point at the same three benefit categories, which are pharmacy, over-the-counter, and the food and nutrition space. Those are the categories where a retailer's cost structure and physical footprint do something a health plan cannot replicate on its own, and they are also the supplemental benefit categories plans have been reworking hardest as benefit budgets tighten.
The structure is different from retail's last attempt
In April 2024, Walmart closed all 51 Walmart Health centers across five states and shut down its virtual care service, ending a multi-year effort to deliver care directly. The premise then was ownership, with the retailer operating the clinical asset. The premise now is narrower, because in this structure Walmart contributes retail infrastructure, consumer reach, and product categories it already runs at scale, while SCAN holds the contract, the network, the bid, the Star Ratings, and every regulatory obligation attached to a Medicare Advantage organization.
That division of labor explains the choice of partner as much as anything else. A retailer looking for clinical ownership needs to buy or build one. A retailer looking for a plan operator needs an experienced one willing to co-brand, and national carriers with their own consumer brands have less reason to put someone else's name on the card. For SCAN, the arithmetic runs the other direction, since a plan of 460,000 members gains far more from a Costco or Walmart membership base than it gives up in brand primacy.
What the structure raises for the rest of the industry
For product and pharmacy leaders, a retail partner changes benefit design more than it changes logos. An over-the-counter or food benefit administered through a retailer the member already shops at weekly behaves differently from a benefit administered through a catalog or a restricted card, and the categories both announcements name suggest both partnerships are built around that difference. Whether it produces measurable utilization or member experience gains is unknown, and it will stay unknown until these products have a plan year behind them.
For marketing and sales teams, the distribution change is sharper. Co-branding puts a Medicare Advantage product in front of consumers inside a retail relationship that has nothing to do with Medicare, which is a different acquisition path altogether from a broker, a direct mail piece, or a Medicare Plan Finder listing. CMS marketing and communications rules apply to co-branded arrangements the same as to any other, so the compliance work sits with the plan regardless of whose name appears on the material.
For anyone watching consolidation, consumer brand and plan operations are being unbundled here rather than merged. The last cycle assumed whoever owned the member relationship should also own the care. These deals assume the two belong to different companies with a contract between them.
The timing, and what is still unknown
Both announcements describe intent rather than product.
The states are unnamed in both cases, the plan year is unstated in both cases, and the benefit lists in both announcements are explicitly conditional on regulatory review. Neither product touches the annual enrollment period opening this October, so nothing here changes your competitive picture for the 2027 plan year. What the announcements do give you is roughly a full cycle of visibility before either product reaches a market, and the open details are narrow. Which states clear approval, whether the co-branded products enter markets where you already compete, and how the over-the-counter and food benefits get administered in practice will all become public well before a member is able to enroll.
If the approvals come through and a second nonprofit signs a comparable deal, the pattern becomes a trend worth planning around. Until then, it is two announcements from one plan.
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