The U.S. Congress has started seriously debating the merits of providing incentives for employers to promote healthy habits for their employees. The argument being that healthy employees are less costly to insure and work better. This is a recent development in the ongoing debate about the U.S. healthcare system, as the focus shifts to the prevention side of the equation.
Promoting Healthy Employees
It seems that the newly formed task force on comprehensive health care is moving toward the idea of incentivizing healthy behavior from employees. The favored approach to this problem is to give tax credits to employers that offer preventative or wellness programs, under the hopes that this will encourage a reduction in obesity rates, tobacco use, and other chronic health problems.
On the surface, this would seem to be a good idea. I believe we can say with some level of confidence that employees who are healthier generally cost less to insure. They tend to be more productive at work, miss fewer days, and report greater overall work satisfaction. But, like so many things, there’s a potential downside. Why?
The maze that is the U.S. legal system has created several stumbling blocks to such legislation. For instance, a 1996 law prevents discriminating against people for their health status or medical history. One wonders if the Alabama tax being levied against obese employees runs counter to this law. The National Workrights Institute has also come out with arguments to this approach, stating that employees could experience discrimination on the basis of their health.
The entire discussion raises a few questions for me. The first is whether employees will begin setting health “metrics” for their employees. For instance – someone who has a cholesterol level of “X” gets hit with an additional insurance fees, regardless of their attempts at fitness. Why is this a concern? Because one of the things that “experts” have started to glean is that genetics drive some of these things, regardless of our lifestyle choices. Case in point, I know a 56-year old marathon runner and hiker that takes a cholesterol lowering drug. Why? Genetics.
So, what do you, the readers think? Is the idea of allowing employers to incentivize their employees to be healthy a positive, or a negative? Is there a risk for abuse in this approach to promoting healthy employees?
