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Walmart Inc. is in preliminary talks to buy insurer Humana Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, a deal that would mark a dramatic shift for the retail behemoth and the latest in a recent flurry of big deals in health-care services. It isn’t clear what terms the companies may be discussing, and there is no guarantee they will strike a deal. If they do, the deal would be big: Humana currently has a market value of about $37 billion. (Mattioli, Nassauer and Wilde Mathews, 3/29)

Should the talks lead to a tieup, it would be the latest deal to bring together a retail chain and a health insurer, following CVS Health Corp's $69 billion deal to acquire Aetna Inc and Cigna Corp's $54 billion deal to buy Express Scripts Holding Co. (O'Donnell and Roumeliotis, 3/29)

An acquisition of Humana’s size -- $37 billion -- would be rare for Walmart, which has mostly been focused on buying e-commerce companies, including last year’s deals for Bonobos Inc. and ModCloth. But the company still gets plenty of shoppers in physical stores who rely on its 4,700 pharmacies in the U.S. Like drugstore chain CVS, Walmart could use a partnership with an insurer, or even a merger, to take on a more powerful role in the delivery of medications to consumers. (Tracer and Hammond, 3/29)