Walmart, the largest retailer in the world and the biggest private employer in the United States, announced Tuesday it is eliminating health insurance for 30,000 of its workers and hiking the costs of premiums across the board.

The cutbacks to coverage, which many charge was insufficient to begin with, were met with immediate criticism.

“Our schedules and hours are all over the place, and I often find less than I expected and less than my family needs when I see my paycheck,” said Nancy Reynolds, a member of OUR Walmart and worker at a Merrit Island, Florida Walmart store. “Taking away access to healthcare, even though many of my co-workers couldn’t afford it anyway, is just another example of Walmart manipulating the system to keep workers like me in a state of financial crisis.”

In a blog post announcing the cuts, Walmart’s Senior Vice President of Global Benefits Sally Welborn claims the company cannot afford the cost of insurance. “This year, the expenses were significant and led us to make some tough decisions as we begin our annual enrollment,” she wrote.

But according to Walmart’s own data, the company is raking in high profits. For the fiscal year of 2014, Walmart “increased net sales by 1.6% to $473.1 billion and returned $12.8 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases,” the company states on its website. Furthermore, in 2014, Walmart was ranked number one on the Fortune 500 list for its large revenues. The Walton family is one of the most wealthy on earth and has consistently been in the Forbes 400 top ten wealthiest list since 2001.

Walmart will stop providing insurance to workers scheduled fewer than 30 hours a week, Welborn explains. As the Wall Street Journal points out, this is not the company’s first cut of this kind. In 2011, Walmart slashed coverage for new employees scheduled fewer than 24 hours a week, and in 2012 it instated the same cuts to new workers scheduled under 30 hours a week.