Here, in an op-ed for the WSJ, the CEO of Safeway Steven Burd describes the health care plan they have instituted, and how it has saved money and increased the overall health of company employees. A few selected quotes:
Safeway's plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity). Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable.
And this gem:
As much as we would like to take credit for being a health-care innovator, Safeway has done nothing more than borrow from the well-tested automobile insurance model. For decades, driving behavior has been correlated with accident risk and has therefore translated into premium differences among drivers. Stated somewhat differently, the auto-insurance industry has long recognized the role of personal responsibility. As a result, bad behaviors (like speeding, tickets for failure to follow the rules of the road, and frequency of accidents) are considered when establishing insurance premiums. Bad driver premiums are not subsidized by the good driver premiums.
So Safeway realized that the auto insurance industry is a good model for health insurance? But did it save money?
By our calculation, if the nation had adopted our approach in 2005, the nation's direct health-care bill would be $550 billion less than it is today. This is almost four times the $150 billion that most experts estimate to be the cost of covering today's 47 million uninsured
So did their auto insurance health care analog improve employee health?
Our obesity and smoking rates are roughly 70% of the national average and our health-care costs for four years have been held constant. When surveyed, 78% of our employees rated our plan good, very good or excellent. In addition, 76% asked for more financial incentives to reward healthy behaviors. We have heard from dozens of employees who lost weight, lowered their blood-pressure and cholesterol levels, and are enjoying better health because of this program. Many discovered for the first time that they have high blood pressure, and others have been told by their doctor that they have added years to their life.I love being right!
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1 comments:
You might indeed be right, Alex, but the useless stats offered by the Safeway guy hardly prove it. I read the whole thing to see if he used any actual evidence, and he didn't. Look at the two statistics he does use: incidence of obesity and smoking relative to the population as a whole, and overall costs. What he doesn't give is anything comparative: how have obesity and smoking rates changed since they adopted this approach? And was that change reflected in the workers who have stayed in the company, or have the policies encouraged less-healthy workers to leave and more-healthy ones to take jobs with Safeway? How about some demographic controls on those stats (i.e., how like or unlike the national average in age, race, gender, and income are the Safeway workers?) And how many of them are there anyway? Is the coverage the same as it was four years ago? Maybe the op-ed format at the WSJ doesn't allow for useful statistics, and the guy was forced to leave the convincing stuff on the cutting room floor, but what he has is meaningless.
Moreover, if I remember correctly, your first post on this topic conflated two things: genetic testing and lifestyle. While I'm entirely open to adjusting premiums or out-of-pocket expenses based on the latter, I will still argue that it's deeply immoral for us as a society to do so based on the former. That, if I'm not mistaken, is what the Senate may vote to prohibit.
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