By USDR.
HealthyWage, has recently sounded the proverbial alarm that starting January 1, 2014, ObamaCare will dramatically expand the ability of companies to penalize employees for lifestyle issues, including being overweight or smoking, in the name of “wellness incentives.” Overweight and obese employees may now face staggering financial penalties of up to 30% of the cost of their health plan, and up to 50% of the cost of their health plan if they smoke.
“Wellness incentives are powerful behavior-change tools,” notes David Roddenberry, co-founder of HealthyWage. “Trouble is, none of the penalty programs that companies are planning to administer under ObamaCare’s expanded penalization allowance bear any resemblance to the wellness incentives that academic, clinical and industry research have shown to be powerful tools that promote behavior change. In fact, there is no published academic research to show that the government’s penalization programs lead to weight loss, but there is ample evidence that these programs are inequitable cost-shifting tools, disproportionately burdening those least able to afford health care.”
This impending ObamaCare program is not voluntary–all employees are forced to lose weight or be penalized. A typical program supported by ObamaCare:
- Penalizes individuals who are overweight in the form of an increased monthly health insurance premium (i.e. employees with a BMI above 30 pay an extra $100/month for health care), or
- Rewards employees who are at a normal BMI (i.e. employees get an extra $100/month in their paycheck for having a BMI below 30)
“Proponents of this program believe that there is currently an insufficient incentive for employees to get and remain healthy,” Roddenberry says. Unfortunately, this short-sighted approach assumes that employees are overweight by choice and that a $1,200/year incentive is enough to change their thinking. Alternatively, supporters argue that people who are overweight should pay more because they are higher cost risk to insure. Proponents liken this penalty for being overweight to an auto insurance penalty for a driver who has previously been in an auto accident or received multiple speeding tickets. However, penalizing employees for their health status violates one of the major purposes of health reform—preserving and expanding access to affordable, adequate, high quality insurance coverage for all Americans.”
HealthyWage underscores that Research funded by ObamaCare has failed to demonstrate that such typical programs actually improve health. The recent RAND report mandated by the Affordable Care Act reviewed all of the literature on wellness incentive programs and concluded that any change in health due to wellness incentives “is small and unlikely to be clinically meaningful.”
“ObamaCare incentives are discriminatory and regressive as obesity rates are highest among minorities and lower paid employees,” urges Roddenberry. “Obesity rates are highest among non-Hispanic blacks (49.5%), compared with Mexican Americans (40.4%), all Hispanics (39.1%) and whites (34.3%). Higher income women are less likely to be obese than lower income women. Our direct experience shows that joining and succeeding in a weight loss incentive program depends on ample communication, but that mission-critical frequent communication is more difficult with employees at the lower end of the economic scale. Field employees and employees without a company email address, are the least likely to sign-up for, and benefit from, these incentive programs. Even if employees do not even hear or know about the advent of the program they are unfairly penalized by them.”
Alternatively, an effective wellness incentive program is one that’s voluntary and grounded in the best practices literature around behavior change. For its part, HealthyWage has offered wellness incentive programs with more than 500 corporate clients, including 50 of the Fortune 500, and has informally run at more than 3,000 companies and organizations. HealthyWage’s market-proven programs are completely voluntary and provide carefully-structured systems of rewards based on discrete behavior-change goals and timeframes. In the company’s fun and engaging challenges, participants put in a nominal amount of their own money, with the amount at their own discretion, and compete either individually or in teams to lose weight and win up to $10,000. HealthyWage’s w ellness incentives are often implemented to help people avoid procrastination, by providing participants with a specific start time, end time and goal, and proffering professional and peer-based support and motivation along the way. In response to escalating marketplace demand for proven effective diet betting programs, HealthyWage has launched its ‘HealthyWager’ initiative offering what no others can: cash prizes tailored to each individual players’ odds of weight loss success based on multi-year actuarial data, with highest prize-to-bet ratios for those with greater weight loss need. This new program, which launched in December 2013, is the pioneering company’s most current game-changing that brings fun and custom tailored financial incentives to market rather than blanket penalties.
“As part of the continued discussion around ObamaCare, we should re-think how wellness incentives are offered,” Roddenberry concludes. “Incentives—when thoughtfully designed and administered—can be more than triple the effectiveness of weight loss programs and properly harnessing the power of this approach is paramount.”
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