By Ellen Simon
Houston Chronicle
April 19, 2007
Large companies plan to keep offering health care coverage to employees, but cut costs by investing in initiatives to improve employee health, according to a survey of 448 companies released Thursday (by human resources consultant Hewitt Associates LLC).
63 percent of the companies in the survey said they plan to take aggressive, multiyear steps to help employees improve their health by increasing education and rolling out disease management programs.
Companies’ efforts at improving employee health range from simple things, such as flipping the food in company vending machines so the nutritional information faces out, to an increasing number of in-house clinics and pharmacists to help employees with primary care.
Almost 70 percent of the companies surveyed, which have an average of 18,758 employees, plan to offer tools, including health risk questionnaires and nurse hotlines, so employees can better manage their health, according to the survey.
“I’ve been in a dozen client meetings where the employer has said, ‘I’d gladly be the second (to drop health care), but I’m not going to be the first,'” said James M. Winkler, practice leader of Hewitt’s health management consulting practice.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/business/4729009.html
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Large employers have had it with rising health care costs, and many are willing to be the second in line to dump their employee health benefit programs.
In the meantime, since they have no control over the fundamental causes of rapidly rising health care costs, they are turning to innovative programs that depend on a healthier employee population to reduce health care spending. Flipping food in employee vending machines to provide purchasers with nutritional information is a good idea. But this and the other initiatives to improve employee health can’t have more than a negligible impact on total health care spending, even though they are commendable measures.
Large employers do want to be relieved of the burden of very high health care costs. Most recognize that it will require a national solution, and that the government will have to play a significant role. The stumbling block is that they have not yet conceded that we must reform financing by adopting a universal program of social insurance, even though a national, government solution, by definition, is, basically, social insurance.
Employers are unable to visualize how the private insurers could provide affordable, comprehensive coverage for everyone, and, frankly, neither can we. We need to eliminate the private insurers and replace them with a single, universal, national health insurance program.
Until we are ready to accept the inevitable, we can keep flipping the food labels in the vending machines. If we are lucky, that might eliminate one heart attack per generation.