A $750 million hospital has broken ground in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the unusual thing about it is who is paying. Alice Walton, the only daughter of the founder of Walmart, has promised $350 million from her foundation toward a 250-bed hospital and cancer centre she has been planning for seven years. The health system Mercy, based in St. Louis, is matching that $350 million. Tyson Foods, the poultry firm headquartered in nearby Springdale, and the Tyson Family Foundation are adding $50 million. At the ceremony last Thursday, Walton, 76 and worth $118 billion, presided in a bright pink jacket, her white hair in a bun, according to Forbes.
The need is not invented. Walton told Forbes by email that “Arkansas faces some of the nation’s greatest health challenges, with outcomes that regularly rank among the lowest in the country.” She pointed to a 2019 study estimating that people in the northwest of the state spend nearly $1 billion a year travelling elsewhere for specialty care. “Think about what that means for someone with a heart condition or a cancer diagnosis,” she wrote. “They’re leaving their home, family, and support system to receive critical care at one of the most difficult times in their lives.”
The state’s picture is worse in its rural counties, where most of Arkansas still lives. Some 78,000 women and girls aged 15 to 44 live in a county with nowhere to give birth and no obstetric services, according to a recent report from March of Dimes. President Trump’s cuts to Medicaid have added pressure on those communities, and the state’s hospitals have lately been cutting services because insurance reimbursement rates are low, according to the Arkansas Advocate. Meanwhile northwest Arkansas itself has grown fast on the back of Walmart and Tyson, straining what health capacity it has.
The complex, named the AWSOM Whole Health Campus, comes with the initials of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, which took in its first class of 48 four-year medical students in 2025. That school sits near Crystal Bridges, the American art museum Walton founded in Bentonville as a non-profit in 2005. When Walton wants something done in Arkansas, it tends to get done. The new campus is meant to feel like a park, with trees, ponds, gardens, walking and biking trails, and art inside and out, much as trails wind around Crystal Bridges. The first building, focused on heart care in affiliation with the Cleveland Clinic, is scheduled to open in 2029. The money goes toward construction and toward recruiting doctors.
“My vision is to create a hub-and-spoke model,” Walton says, “to extend the reach of specialized high-quality care across the state ensuring patients and providers in rural communities have access to advanced services regardless of geography.” She offers the project as a pattern for others: “Philanthropy can play a role in bridging gaps, and these days most rural communities have gaps they’re struggling to address. I believe the work we do in Northwest Arkansas can be a blueprint for others to replicate in any other geography.”
The word “blueprint” deserves a hard look. Philanthropy can bridge a gap only where a billionaire happens to live, and northwest Arkansas is where Walmart’s money lives. The same state has counties with no maternity care at all, a Medicaid programme being cut by the federal government, and hospitals shedding services for want of payment. A $750 million gift will fix some of that within reach of Bentonville. Whether a country’s medical care should depend on the addresses of its billionaires is the question the gift raises and cannot answer.
A billionaire and a doctor, contesting Ohio
The same Forbes newsletter reports on a governor’s race in Ohio that puts both kinds of health politics on one ballot. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate, made his money through Roivant Sciences, a drug development company he founded in 2014 and took public via a SPAC in 2021; Forbes estimates his wealth at $2.3 billion. Roivant’s market capitalisation now stands at $28.1 billion, up 78% this year, helped by positive clinical results on its pulmonary hypertension drug this month, and Forbes estimates Ramaswamy has sold about $1.2 billion of its stock in the twelve months he has been campaigning. His Democratic opponent is Amy Acton, 60, a physician who ran Ohio’s public health department during its aggressive Covid-19 response in 2020. Ramaswamy, 41, built his political name accusing the government of overreach during the pandemic. The race to succeed the term-limited Republican Mike DeWine is considered a tossup, with Acton pointing to his private-jet travel as a sign he is out of touch with families squeezed by rising costs. Were Ramaswamy to win, Forbes notes, he would be the third-richest elected official in America, behind President Donald Trump, worth $7 billion, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, worth $4.2 billion.