Can Wellness Programs Lower Health Premiums?
In the midst of Healthcare Reform, employers are finding that rising healthcare premiums are significantly impacting their businesses and profitability. Not simply are employers feeling the consequences of rising costs, but workers are also. While Medical care Reform is usually blamed of these rising costs, there could be something a great deal larger in play that most employers have never even addressed or considered: the aggregate decline in health of these employees.
Our business environment drastically changed from being an economic leader in manufacturing and production to a economy that operates mostly on information. Because of technological advances, most employees can work from their computer as opposed to going around to accomplish tasks.
It is no wonder that staff is becoming less healthy plus much more overweight when a job could be completed from your computer on the internet. This isn’t always really the only element in play, but is obviously a sizable reason for the increasingly unhealthy employee population as well as the boost in health premiums. According to the Thomson Reuters Workforce Wellness Index – which measures bmi, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar levels and tobacco – the Wellness index declined 2 percent from 86.4 to 84.4 from 2005 to 2009. In cases like this, a score of 100 indicates no health hazards were in play.
