Benefits Buzz

The WWE has a Wellness Program?

I was as astounded as you were to learn last week that wrestler Oscar Gutierrez (Rey Mysterio) was suspended from wrestling for 30 days because he was in violation of the WWE’s Wellness Program.  I know!  Who knew the WWE had a wellness program?  When I read this, I wondered what their ROI is.  How are they keeping employees engaged?  What vendor have they partnered with to manage the program?  How exciting to have an organization so visible to the public out there championing the wellness effort!

So I Googled it.  “WWE Wellness Program.”  Sure enough, a press release for the WWE Wellness Program showed up at the top of the list.  From the program outline:

“NEWS ALERT -- Effective today, February 27, 2006, WWE is implementing a broad WWE Talent Wellness Program. The Program has two components: 1) an aggressive substance abuse and drug testing policy; and 2) a cardiovascular testing and monitoring program.”

As it turns out, the WWE “Wellness Program” is what the rest of us would call a drug policy.  But the press release is from 2006.  Let’s give WWE the benefit of the doubt.  Let’s check out the company’s official Talent Wellness Program Summary.  According to this website, key components of the program include:

• Comprehensive Medical and Wellness Staffing and Infrastructure
• Cardiovascular Testing and Monitoring Program
• Mandatory ImPACT™ Testing
• Substance Abuse and Drug Testing Policy
• Annual Physical Examinations and Blood Screening
• Referrals to Consulting Health Care Providers On An As Needed Basis

Maybe WWE deserves some credit.  While I suspect they aren’t aggressively managing health in the way a traditional wellness program might, one has to give them credit for implementing a program to monitor their talent’s cardiovascular, brain, and general overall health.  This would seem to be in line with how most professional sporting organizations would operate.  And it would appear that their drug policy makes up only a small portion of their overall wellness program (albeit a more visible portion of it).  But it doesn’t appear that the program focuses much on providing coaching or case management, perhaps because most of their wrestlers rely more heavily on their own personal trainers.

Food for thought: I wonder whether the WWE is tracking ROI the way the rest of us would to see whether they’re getting any bang for their buck from their wellness program.  I also wonder whether this program is specific to their wrestlers or if it applies to all employees.  If all employees, this would likely not fit the bill for an effective program. 

I suspect, like me, you think the WWE’s “Wellness Program” is more PR than effective health management.  But the next time you’re in a meeting with decision makers in your organization making the case for a company wide wellness program, be sure to point out that even the WWE has a wellness program.  Who knows?  Someone in your C-suite may be a closet wrestling fan.

Editor's Note - Greg Dagley is a Benefits Consultant for a large multinational employer in Houston, TX. While his company has employees all over the globe, his job keeps him focused on US benefits and spending a lot of his time managing external vendors.  Is there any doubt his Excel skills are more advanced than yours?

Who Would’ve Thought I’d Have Anything in Common With Whole Foods CEO John Mackey?

I have a confession to make.  I get my groceries at Wally-World.  There’s one near my house, their prices are lower than another nearby grocery store, and I don’t mind the inevitable overcrowding on Sunday afternoon.  Some of you will count this against me since, for years, this establishment was known to have had a less than stellar track record in the way it treated its workers, and it may be single-handedly responsible for ending the age of mom-and-pop stores of all varieties (grocery, specialty, you name it).  To the first issue, I would say that Wal-Mart heard your concerns and has made efforts to improve relations with its employees.  And to the second, if it hadn’t been Wal-Mart, it would’ve been someone else putting mom-and-pop out of business.  It’s called capitalism.

My second confession is that I don’t eat anything organic (unless by accident).  Only God (and perhaps the FDA) knows what sorts of chemicals I’m ingesting when I eat the food purchased at my local Wally-World.  It hasn’t killed me, yet, so I’m not terribly worried.  So, who would’ve thought I’d come down on the side of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey in the debate over health reform.

In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Mackey makes his proposals for health reform, and I agree with most of them.  What I admire about him is that he puts his money where his mouth is.  Whole Foods rolled out a Consumer Driven Health Plan (CDHP) with a Health Savings Account (HSA) several years back and has been serious about promoting it with employees and teaching them how to use it.  Employees are educating themselves about the plan and are, in fact, doing what CDHPs are designed to encourage them to do: shopping for health care services.

To be sure, I’m not certain CDHPs are going to save our health care industry.  But I do think they encourage people to think more carefully about their health care decisions.  I think that CDHPs should  be carefully designed to cover preventative things like regular checkups at low or no cost (i.e., not subject to the deductible).  Otherwise, some people will be inclined to avoid checkups in order to preserve their HSA balance.  That said, putting more responsibility on consumers seems like something else I remember that made this country great.  Oh yeah -- now I remember.  It’s called capitalism.

Mackey’s other proposals?

• Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.
• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.
• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.
• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
• Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.
• Enact Medicare reform.
• Revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Enacting any one of these changes would be challenging (an understatement?) given the interests that would be affected.  Nevertheless, to me, these are reasonable proposals for health reform that would encourage market-based solutions and deserve as much discussion as the options currently being debated.

Editor's Note - Greg Dagley is a Benefits Consultant for a large multinational employer in Houston, TX. While his company has employees all over the globe, his job keeps him focused on US benefits and spending a lot of his time managing external vendors.  Is there any doubt his Excel skills are more advanced than yours?

Smoke 'em If You Got 'em - Unless We Have a Policy Against It....

A follow up to one of my first ever posts over at the HR Capitalist.  Scott Rodrigues had been working as a lawn-care employee for The Scotts Co. for only about two weeks when he was fired in 2006 after a drug test found nicotine in his urine, a violation of a company policy forbidding employees to smoke on or off the job. He promptly filed a lawsuit that argued, among other things, that the company violated his right to privacy.

As the Boston Globe reports, that case has made it through the courts, and the courts upheld the Ability of Scotts to terminate Rodriques for smoking:

"Now a federal judge has dismissed the Bourne man’s suit, ruling that Rodrigues’s smoking was not a protected privacy interest because he never kept his puffing a secret.

In granting Scotts’s motion for summary judgment, US District Court Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. said that Rodrigues admitted in a deposition that he smoked while walking down the street and in a restaurant parking lot and was caught by a Scotts supervisor with a pack of cigarettes on his dashboard.

“It is clear from those admissions that Rodrigues has not attempted to keep the fact of his smoking private,’’ O’Toole wrote.

The judge also rejected Rodrigues’s contention that his firing violated the 1974 federal law that protects employees’ rights to their benefits. O’Toole said that law did not protect Rodrigues because he was not yet a bona fide employee and was only working on the condition that he passed the urinalysis.

Jim King, a spokesman for Scotts, which is based in Marysville, Ohio, said the smoking ban has never been used to fire “an existing employee,’’ only to screen out applicants. Since the ban went into effect, he said, the percentage of smokers among the company’s roughly 7,000 employees has fallen from 28 percent to 7 percent.

“We’re obviously pleased with how [O’Toole] ruled,’’ he said. “We think the ruling speaks for itself.’’

Scotts’s smoking ban was announced in 2005 by chief executive Jim Hagedorn, a former two-pack-a-day smoker, and went into effect Oct. 1, 2006, giving the company’s employees nearly a year to prepare. Scotts has paid for employees and their families to take part in smoking cessation programs.

King told the Globe after Rodrigues filed his suit that the tobacco policy was intended to reduce medical costs for the self-insured company, which he described as deeply committed to promoting good health among employees. He pointed out that Scotts built a $5 million wellness center in Marysville and reimburses some workers for fitness club memberships."

Now for the big question based on the wording of the ruling.  What if the prospective employee had attempt to keep his smoking a secret?  Would the ruling have stood?

Interesting stuff.  I'm not sure we can get to wherever it is we are going in the healthcare debate (especially from a cost perspective) until employees have incentives or penalties to motivate them to live healthier.

Time Magazine - Exercise Doesn't Help You Lose Weight...

Weight Loss has long been thought to be a calories in, calories out type of thing that was aided by exercise.  Now, Time Magazine's throwing one of those cover articles out (titled, "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin") that's sure to make a lot of people say "A-HA!!!"

More from the Time article:

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Earlier this year, the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE — PLoS is the nonprofit Public Library of Science — published a remarkable study supervised by a colleague of Ravussin's, Dr. Timothy Church, who holds the rather grand title of chair in health wisdom at LSU. Church's team randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week, respectively, for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical-activity routines. All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out monthly medical-symptom questionnaires.

The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised — sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months — did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.

What's going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you and I might know it as the lip-licking anticipation of perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip to the gym. Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home."

The article's a good read, so give it a run.  The problem with mass media articles like this is that they tend to not change anything, with the exception of making those avoiding exercise feel emboldened like they are somehow doing the right thing.  I haven't been exercising, but guess what?  Time ran that big article that said exercise doesn't work - so there's no reason for me to start.

Meanwhile, regardless of the reality regarding exercise's impact on weight loss, that same group gets none of the other postive impacts of exercise in their daily lives.

Worse yet, their kids grow up with no exposure to exercise as a part of a healthy lifestyle.

Thanks Time...

Utah Plans a Marketplace/Exchange for Healthcare....

As the future of President Obama’s health care reform initiative and its ambitious timetable grow more uncertain, you may be interested in learning how some states are taking matters into their own hands with practical solutions that can be quickly implemented – rather than waiting around for a federal plan.
 
The State of Utah passed legislation in late 2008 that mandated the creation of a health insurance “marketplace” or “exchange” that connects consumers to a Website where they can evaluate insurance options and make informed purchasing decisions.  The first phase of the Utah Health Exchange, a “defined contribution” model for small employers (2 to 50 employees), is now underway and will be launched in November, 2009. 

In the first phase of the Exchange’s implementation, the plan will create the “defined contribution” model for small employers (2 to 50 employees).  In this model, employers define a specific dollar amount to contribute to their employees’ health insurance premiums and then employees can “shop” at the Exchange from a menu of plans offered by participating insurers.  This model enhances private competition and transparency in the health care system by giving employees the necessary information and purchasing power to make informed health insurance choices.  It also offers relief to employers who will no longer bear the full burden of administering a health plan for their employees.   

The technology behind the Utah plan is suited to the Exchange’s model because it can present consumers with side-by-side comparisons of plan options and costs with “drill down” details and links to forms and documents all in one location and at the “point of purchase.”  It can also handle the numerous administrative complexities raised by this approach, including the transmission of electronic feeds to multiple carriers and the funding of health insurance premiums from multiple sources such as the government or a spouse’s employer.  

Interesting times...