Great Employer Health Plans Work

Many self-insured employers have great prevention, health-care delivery and health insurance plan design, all of which are producing better health at lower cost. Companies like Pitney Bowes, Quad Graphics, and Safeway, to name a few, have innovated in prevention and wellness programs by creating a healthy work environment, providing financial incentives for healthier behaviors, delivering superb primary care on site and designing health insurance to drive the right individual and provider behaviors.

The best of the self-insured employers succeed because they have three inherent advantages over any other part of the health-care system:
• Employers realize all of the benefits from the health of their employees, including reduced costs from disability, workers compensation, and absenteeism and improved productivity, morale and loyalty;
• Employers can deliver high-quality health care in close proximity to where employees spending most of their waking hours; and
• Because they are less regulated than insurance companies, and have more freedom of action than Medicare or other government plans, they innovate more and can correct mistakes more easily.

At Pitney Bowes, we saw opportunities to improve our approach to obesity by requiring people to use a residential program called Structure House in North Carolina before they had access to gastric bypass surgery. Except for one case, they never needed the surgery. The residential program was a fraction of the surgery's cost, much less risky, and very effective in terms of long-term weight loss. Insured or government plans could not move quickly or at all to do this because regulations or laws limit their flexibility. Rather than treating these employer programs as interesting exceptions, we should figure out how to increase their reach and reduce regulations covering them, such as the 20 percent limit on wellness incentives created by federal regulation in 2006.

By Michael Critelli  |  June 30, 2009; 8:43 AM ET  | Category:  Health Care Reform
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