The Partnership for Avoidance was formed to encourage Fortune 1000 companies to consider making workforce health a CEO issue and adopt strategies to promote avoidance and wellness.
After a few years of double-digit rate increases for medical insurance, businesses are realizing that among the best ways to slow the cost increases is to have personnel take more responsibility for both costs and health choices.
A majority of organizations surveyed feel that the best way for decreasing costs is financial incentives to encourage personnel to adopt healthier life choices.
Almost 100% of companys surveyed say that health care costs will be a crucial or meaningful concern over the next five years, according to a recent survey by United Benefit Advisors.
More corporations are adopting higher deductible healthcare plans with HRA’s or HSA’S, health promotion programs, and expanded disease management (DM) programs to control ever-increasing health care costs.
Failure to deal with these issues may be disastrous for an business. Wayne Sensor, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Alegent Health lately stated, “I think that we’ve built a health care machinery we cannot afford. I think we are choking the economic engine of America.”
In his October 2005 newsletter, Dr. Andrew Weil stated, “I think rising health- care costs are becoming the major economic issue in our nation”. Obesity costs California organizations billions of dollars each year.
Projected costs for 2005 may reach 28 billion dollars for direct and indirect healthcare costs, employee’s compensation, and lost productivity. California has experienced among the fastest growing rates of obesity of any state.
According to California Health and Human Services Secretary Kim Belshe, “The obesity epidemic is more than a public health crisis, it is an economic crisis.” What’s frightening is that most people do not even realize that they are obese, which is defined as only 20% above normal weight.
There’s a excellent need for additional education on weight and resulting diseases, and the workplace is an ideal venue. Wellness education and programs can lead to a meaningful return on investment and, if structured properly, can produce causes a very short period of time.
Although many businesss have attempted some form of health promotion program in the past, results from those efforts have been disappointing.
In many cases, the healthier staff participated for incentives, like health club memberships, but those who needed it most didn’t take benefit of the health promotion program in a meaningful way.
Corporations are looking at ways to encourage more staff to purchase into the wellness movement.
A recent webinar hosted by Human Resource (HR) Executive Magazine and presented by Carlson Marketing and Advertising Group titled, “Healthier Employees; Healthier Bottom Line – Engaging Staff Members is the Missing Link in Managing Health Care Costs,” drove this point home.
This session provided actionable advice on how companies are achieving higher impact with their wellness investments by focusing on worker engagement. It also highlighted how you can develop an Economic Engagement Model to forecast the potential impact for your corporation.
Businesss can simply no longer ignore the issue of their employee’s unhealthy life choices and must act to engage them in a meaningful wellness program to reduce health costs, absenteeism and lost productivity.
Workers also benefit as they derive better health and greater satisfaction in both their personal and specialist lives. The alternative is being caught in a non-competitive position and severely impacting the bottom-line of the corporation.
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