The value of wellness as a benefit to employees and employers alike cannot be overstated.
A member of my staff arrived a little late for work one day because she took a finger stick blood test for health insurance coverage under her husband's plan. It was part of a healthy initiative program, which included a wellness assessment as well as a blood screening test.
As an incentive to participate in the assessment and screening, the employer offered gift cards valued at $30 to employees and $25 to spouses, in addition to incentives of up to $175 in premium credits for completing the entire healthy initiative wellness program. Her husband's employer, she observed, elected to make these incentives part of the company's benefits package to help people understand wellness.
At an MI2 seminar this past fall, one of the speakers, Gary Earl of Health, Hope & Purpose Inc., spoke of his experience as benefit manager for a Fortune 500 firm. The company dedicated significant resources to encouraging wellness on the part of workers. He spearheaded the creation of a wellness program because he saw how costs in the company's medical plan increased in conjunction with costs of treating preventable diseases, such as obesity.
He pointed out the growing dossier of data connecting obesity with adult onset diabetes, and how a diabetic employee costs the health plan more than $13,000 annually. To help curtail these scenarios, his team created a proactive strategy to promote employee wellness. They calculated that the cost of creating and maintaining the wellness program would be far less than the long-term costs of treating preventable diseases.
To obtain first-hand information from a benefit manager's perspective, I called on Peter Mick, the director of employee benefits of Roundy's Inc. Headquartered in Milwaukee, Roundy's is a major grocery retailer and wholesaler. Its medical benefit plan covers about 7,000 employees. Mick described the company's strategy as moving away from a health and accident plan designed to pay benefits after a loss.
Roundy's wellness plan includes a health risk assessment and the "finger stick" blood study. They are introducing a high-deductible medical plan/HRA combination that includes a significant firstdollar subsidy with no cap on preventive care benefits. Roundy's ordinarily requires a low employee premium portion for its group medical plan. However, employees who don't participate in the wellness program need to pay a higher premium of $75 per week. This reverse pricing is an incentive that, in effect, requires employees to participate.
Mick noted that 65 percent of the medical claims come from 5 percent of the company's covered population.
The real purpose of the wellness initiative is not to identify those who are chronic users, but to identify those who have a risk factor that can be addressed through wellness-based intervention. Any employee or dependent who doesn't move into the chronic user group saves money for the group itself, and for the individual as well, who personally follows a new path to a healthier life.
The concept of wellness as a benefit, as expressed in Mick's description of Roundy's goal of a true healthcare plan, is one that is likely to move to the forefront of a core medical plan design. COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE >> Incentives pave path to wellness.
MARTY TRAYNOR CAN BE REACHED AT MARTY.TRAYNOR@TRUSTMARKINS.COM.
