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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to eliminate health insurance coverage for most of its part-time US employees in a move aimed at controlling rising healthcare costs of the nation's largest private employer.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press, the company will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot, and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

"We had to make some tough decisions," Sally Welborn, Wal-Mart's senior vice president of benefits, told The Associated Press.

Welborn says the company will use a third-party organization to help part-time workers find insurance alternatives: "We are trying to balance the needs of (workers) as well as the costs of (workers) as well as the cost to Wal-Mart."

The announcement comes after Wal-Mart said far more US employees and their families were enrolling in its healthcare plans than it had expected following rollout of the Affordable Care Act. Wal-Mart, which employs about 1.4 million full- and part-time US workers, says about 1.2 million Wal-Mart workers and family members combined now participate in its healthcare plan.

That has had an impact on Wal-Mart's bottom line. Wal-Mart now expects the impact of higher healthcare costs to be about $500 million for the current fiscal year, or about $170 million higher than the original estimate of about $330 million that it gave in February.

But Wal-Mart is among the last of its peers to cut health insurance for some part-time workers. In 2013, 62 percent of large retail chains didn't offer healthcare benefits to any of their part-time workers, according to Mercer, a global consulting company. That's up from 56 percent in 2009.

"Retailers who offer part-time benefits are more of an exception than the rule," says Beth Umland, director of research for health and benefits at Mercer.

Wal-Mart has been scaling back eligibility for part-time workers over the past few years, though. In 2011, Wal-Mart said it was cutting backing eligibility of its coverage of part-time workers working less than 24 hours a week. And then in 2013, it announced a threshold of 30 hours or under.

Wal-Mart, like most big companies, also is increasing premiums, or out-of-pocket costs that employees pay, to counter rising healthcare costs. Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it was raising premiums for all of its full-time workers: For a basic plan, of which 40 percent of its workers are enrolled, the premiums will go up to $21.90 per pay period, up from $18.40, starting Jan. 1.

Wal-Mart also said that changes in the co-insurance, or the percentage workers pay before coverage kicks in, for the health reimbursement accounts and the health savings accounts would result in the company paying 75 percent of the eligible costs of doctor visits, tests, hospitalization, and other services within the network after employees meet their deductible. That's down from 80 percent.