Survey: Employers Fret Over Workers’ Poor Health Habits
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As Washington dissects President Obama’s health-care plan and both parties prepare to grapple with health woes at Thursdays summit, employers are saying their biggest cost problem lies at home.
Workers poor health habits were cited by 67% of companies as a top challenge to maintaining affordable benefit coverage in a new survey by Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health. The next highest challenge, cited by 41%, was a tie between high-cost catastrophic cases and end-of-life care and under use of preventive services. And 58% of the companies said the biggest obstacle to changing employee behavior related to health is the lack of engagement by workers.
To deal with those problems, the employers said they were stepping up a number of wellness efforts that have been increasingly popular for several years, including prodding workers to fill out a health-risk appraisal, offering the services of health coaches and trimming certain drug co-pays for employees with chronic conditions.
Of course, the trend among employers for several years have been to boost workers out-of-pocket expenses to help defray the rising benefit expenses; according to the survey, health costs were up 7% in 2009 and are expected to rise 6.5% this year.
Indeed, […]
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