Marjorie Saporu is one reason why employers are starting to reward workers based on their health.
When the administrative assistant learned her blood pressure prevented her from receiving a maximum break on her company’s health insurance, she took steps to reduce anxiety, cut out bad foods and started taking strolls through the Midtown Global Market adjacent to her office at Allina Health. Limited by osteoarthritis, the 56-year-old also learned how to strengthen her knees by simply rising from her office chair without using her hands and then doing a series of squats.
The quirky routine gets her some strange looks, but she just responds, “I’m doing my physical therapy.”
A growing number of companies are awarding — or are thinking about awarding — financial incentives to workers who can show “biometric outcomes” for getting healthy. They’ll give gift cards or reduced health payments to workers who lower their blood pressure, lose weight or stop smoking.
Incentives based on personal health are the latest twist in workplace wellness programs that emerged a decade ago to rein in the skyrocketing cost of health insurance. But the approach is controversial, stirring opposition from those who don’t believe it is fair to base financial rewards on health problems that can be beyond workers’ control.
A union representing 350 workers at a group of Allina clinics, for example, has made fighting the program its top priority.
Traditional incentives have tied rewards for workers to participation in wellness programs. Attend a session on healthy living, get a gift card.
Complete a health questionnaire and get a price break on the company health plan.
New data released this past week from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual survey of employers show this remains the most common approach. Only 55 percent of large employers with wellness plans even offer biometric testing of patients’ weight, blood pressure, cholesterol or other measures, and only 10 percent of those employers use the results to reward or penalize workers, according to the Kaiser data.
But that could change soon. A separate survey by the Towers Watson consulting firm found that nearly half of employers were considering switching to wellness incentives based on biometric outcomes for 2014 or 2015.
That shift is coming because rewards based on participation only “just aren’t achieving the sort of returns that you’d like,” said Jeff Zwiefel, an executive vice president for Life Time Fitness.
The Minneapolis company, known mostly for its fitness clubs, has bet on the movement toward outcomes-based incentives with a program called myHealthScore, which assigns scores on a 100-point scale to workers based on biometrics testing. Allina, Dakota County and six other employers use the scoring system, which determines the level of reward their workers receive.
Kind of like car insurance
Zwiefel said a system that distributes rewards based on fitness makes sense and is akin to auto insurance.
“If you have a ticket with auto insurance,” he said. “Your rates go up.”
The approach worked for Saporu after her first screening in 2012 left her with only a partial discount on her workplace health insurance in 2013. Through all of her efforts, Saporu lowered her systolic blood pressure 13 points and she qualified for the maximum benefit — a $1,014 credit on her insurance premium — in 2014.
Her score isn’t perfect. She’s still overweight, but she is motivated to try to improve that as well by walking 6,000 steps a day and managing her osteoarthritis so she can stay active. Maintaining the financial incentives are at least a part of the motivation, she added.
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