June 30 (Bloomberg) -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it supports legislation that would require large companies to offer health-care insurance to their workers, offering a boost to President Barack Obama’s plans to revamp the system.

“Not every business can make the same contribution, but everyone must make some contribution,” Wal-Mart, the largest U.S. private employer, said today in a letter to Obama. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer distributed the letter via e-mail and said it favors “the strongest possible commitment to rein in health-care costs.”

Rising medical costs threaten U.S. economic growth and put financial pressure on companies, according to Wal-Mart, which said it has backed health-care reform since 2006. The company said more than 94 percent of its 1.4 million U.S. workers have coverage through the company or another provider, spurring it to focus on containing costs.

“An essential goal of health-care reform is to insure as many of the uninsured as possible and to bring the cost of health care down,” said David Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman. “We think a broad-based employer mandate is essential to both those goals.”

Signing the letter were Mike Duke, Wal-Mart’s president and chief executive officer; Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union; and John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group.

Stepping Up

Several of the signers hand-delivered the letter to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. The company’s lobbyists also met with officials from the Senate Finance and Health panels, which are drafting legislation, Tovar said.

The letter’s timing was intended to co-opt the voices of opposition, said Judy Feder, who is on leave as a public policy professor at Georgetown University in Washington while serving as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

“We want to take the lead in making it clear that the business community will step up, along with labor” to support health-care reform and to say that an employer mandate is “a responsible thing to do,” Feder said in a telephone interview after the White House meeting. “The commitment here is to get out in front of that opposition.”

Getting Behind Obama

The letter was the latest sign that some major interest groups and influential companies are coalescing behind Obama’s push to overhaul the health-care system.

Still, the declaration doesn’t necessarily guarantee the group’s ultimate support for comprehensive legislation, said Ed Howard, executive vice president of the Alliance for Health Reform, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates universal coverage.

Like most stakeholders, the groups represented by the letter’s signers may end up walking away, he said. “Nobody’s settled on the details yet.”

Wal-Mart fell 32 cents to $48.44 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.

To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Burritt in Greensboro, North Carolina, at 1348 or cburritt@bloomberg.net. Edwin Chen in Washington at echen32@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 30, 2009 17:28 EDT