“Only a handful of outlier health problems are preventable in any real sense,” writes Dave Chase in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, “about seven percent, according to my colleague, Al Lewis.”
My last post was about the cost of outliers, how just a small percentage of patients account for a huge percentage of overall healthcare spending in the United States. We know that there are a few unlucky individuals whose healthcare is incredbily costly, yet they are not the first people we think of when we think about excessive healthcare spending in the United States. As a result, we fail to truly understand the weaknesses of our healthcare system and how our healthcare dollars are actually being spent. We introduce programs that don’t actually address the real problems in escalating healthcare costs.
This is where the ideas about and problems with wellness programs begin. Chase continues, “While the notion of workplace wellness and prevention was a noble idea, we now know that company after company is spending a huge amount of plan dollars and resources trying to do something that can’t be done.”
The idea of workplace wellness programs is to encourage healthy living habits and lifestyles of employees. Since our employers are usually paying a lot for our healthcare coverage and sometimes directly for our healthcare, anything employers can do that makes employees more healthy, outside of the healthcare space, will reduce the healthcare costs and needs of employees, generating a return on investment in the long run.
Unfortunately, the people who cost the most, who really drive incredibly high healthcare spending in the United States, don’t suffer from conditions that can be addressed through workplace wellness programs. Your plan to encourage workers to walk more, to buy foam rollers for the office, and to reward employees who count calories is not going to prevent an employee from being diagnosed with a congenital heart arrhythmia, won’t stop a rare blood disorder, and isn’t going to prevent any other unpredictable obscure disease from costing thousands or millions of dollars for your health plan.
What is worse, wellness programs usually just encourage those who are already living healthy lifestyles to flaunt how healthy their lifestyle already is. You likely won’t reach or encourage the employee who has a second job someplace else, the single mom with two kids who is just trying to get dinner on the plate each night, or the employee who has been discouraged and dejected their whole life. An Apple Watch or an iPad isn’t going to solve the problem of a long commute, an unsafe neighborhood, or past trauma. We spend a lot of money on wellness plans that don’t address the real upstream social determinants of health for many employees, and can’t possibly address the health problems of the most expensive outliers in our healthcare system. The idea of workplace wellness programs has the right spirit, but the truth is these interventions need to happen at a much larger level than what the employer can really address.
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