Health Means Wealth For Workers And Employers
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Traci Waters, benefits specialist for the DLR Group, was thinking about rising health insurance costs and how to involve employees in actions that can lead to lower rate increases. “A lot of people think, ‘Well, the insurance company is just raising rates, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ But the more employees control their costs, the lower the rates will be for everyone,” Waters says.
DLR, an architectural and engineering firm with 620 employees in 15 cities, decided to offer some serious financial incentives, as well as support, to encourage Waters’ idea.
The firm hired Interactive Health Solutions (IHS), a national company which assesses employee health, to test employees on five health factors, including weight, cholesterol and smoking. Each employee received a health target, such as losing 20 pound or cutting cholesterol by a certain number of points.
Testing was voluntary, but DLR made it enticing by picking up $315 more of each employee's annual health insurance premiums, freeing that amount up for personal budgets, just for testing.
Those who reach the benchmark set for them will receive an additional $630 health premium bonus, for a total of almost $950 for testing and reaching goals.
Employees were interested! And the programs were relatively low tech and low cost.
In its Omaha, Neb., headquarters 20 people wanted to lose weight, and found that Weight Watchers would provide weekly meetings on-site. Another 11 started their own "Biggest Loser" group. In about four months, the Weight Watcher group lost an average of almost 24 pounds, and the biggest losers about 10 pounds each.
Forty employees formed a walk-run-bike club, which has logged more than 1.3 million steps, an average of 32,500 steps per person. Employees have requested health snacks and juice in company vending machines, and started their own newsletter with wellness info and healthy recipes.
Encouragement to lose weight has been a popular company health program for a number of years. Firms may do it all with outside consultants, such as Boston-based Tangerine Wellness, which says it has helped dozens of companies lose "several tons." At Woods Equipment Co. in Oregon, Ill., 335 workers completed the first three months of an 18-month program and lost an average of 2.24 percent of their body weight, earning more than $5,000 in rewards.
Health evaluation programs can be higher tech. IHS offers evaluations that tell employees about their indicators for heart disease, diabetes, smoking and other health problems that are somewhat controllable by lifestyle, and will run up to 36 additional blood tests.
Within 48 hours after evaluation, the company issues a report to each employee advising them of health risk factors. The company recommends a personal course of action, offers in-person and online health courses, and sends ongoing individualized encouragement and tips.
Weight may affect life insurance costs, according to InsWeb. There has been some discussion about weight affecting health insurance premiums since a 1987 court ruling that health insurance plans could charge different rates for smokers and non-smokers, but that would be likely to run into trouble with various non-discrimination and health portability laws. Offering lower rates as an incentive for healthy weight might be a more likely course in the future.