Corporate wellness programs can transform your health and save the country billions
Wellness - prevention of disease while maintaining healthfulness - matters to everyone. Think about how great you feel (or would feel) after your doctor tells you your improved nutrition and increased activity have lowered your blood pressure to the ideal 110/76, reducing your risk of stroke to that of someone who never had BP problems. That feel-good moment matters for your continued commitment to better health.
Your wellness matters to your employer, too. All organizations want healthy, productive employees who are absent less often and whose health insurance costs less. But health care bills are skyrocketing; in 2016, HMO coverage for an employee family plan averaged more than $12,000 per year!
The federal government should care about wellness and prevention too, since it contributes billions of dollars to protect you - and you, and you - from everything from arthritis to Zika. In 2016, the national bill for health and wellness was $3.3 TRILLION.
The Real Headline: 80-plus percent of that staggering amount goes toward handling chronic diseases, such as arthritis, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease and some cancers - which half of you suffer from. And the incidence of chronic disease is growing five to seven times faster than the population!
But we know how to prevent 80 to 90 percent of those chronic diseases! Clean up the food chain; increase activity; practice sleep and stress management; improve the environment and infrastructure; institute work safety programs; support childhood care ... the list of effective remedies goes on and on.
So what can be done to upgrade the health of all Americans and prevent health care costs from bankrupting the country? Establish wellness programs that support, incentivize and sustain every employee's commitment to defeating chronic diseases.
A recent study claimed that company-based wellness programs don't improve employee health or reduce employer costs, but they're wrong. That study looked at results over 12 months from a program that offered little in the way of personalized support. Transforming America and Americans into a shining example of wellness is a marathon, not a sprint. The Cleveland Clinic, which launched its own employees' wellness program more than a decade ago, has the hard data that proves how effective the right programs can be.
Data from the Clinic's more than 100,000 employees show that creating community support and providing incentives, expert counselors and flexible options helps people take charge of their health and saves big bucks.
-Incentives inspire: If an employee and a dependent family member join a wellness program and meet certain health goals, the Clinic's employees can save up to $1,000 off family health insurance plans.
-Choices matter: The program offers free fitness centers, stress-management classes, nutritional counseling/cooking classes, yoga, smoking cessation and much more.
-Employees have shed more than 445,000 pounds and average body mass index falls 0.5 percent annually. The U.S. average increases by 0.37 percent or about 1.25 pounds a year.
-Smoking rates are down to under 5 percent from 15.4 percent!
-Immunization rates are up substantially.
-Six or seven years ago (see, this is long term), chronic diseases among employees rose 10 percent annually; now they're decreasing by 2 percent yearly. We believe those remarkable stats are because in 2012 more than 50 percent of our employees with chronic diseases were in a disease-management program, as opposed to the national average of less than 15 percent.
-The medical center and its employees save more than $80 million annually through lower premiums. Additional savings come from having healthier employees who are sick less often, need fewer doctor visits and are more productive.
-All in, the Clinic has saved a whopping $254 million in the past three years for employees and dependents, in addition to what each employee saved.
So if your company has a wellness program (83 percent of those with 200 or more employees do), join. Make it work for you, and make it fun! You'll end up with a younger RealAge and a healthier wallet!
Distributed by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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