What Is a Health Insurance Employee Incentive?
Health insurance employee incentives might be one of the few true "win-win" situations in the business world. These programs help employees improve their health and reduce their medical expenses, and they help companies reduce the cost of group health insurance.
Other People Are Reading
-
The Premise
-
What you pay for health insurance depends on how likely you are to get sick. Smokers, for example, pay higher premiums than nonsmokers. Conversely, people with healthy lifestyles pay less. But how do you take unhealthy people and turn them into healthy people? This is where employee incentives come in.
-
Therapy
-
Two popular employee incentive programs are stop-smoking programs and stress management. Smoking causes cancer and heart disease, and stress can lead to many problems, including high blood pressure. So employees who quit smoking cut their risk of cancer and other illnesses, and employees who control their stress are less likely to develop hypertension.
Fitness
-
Exercise is important to avoiding many health problems, including high cholesterol and obesity. The insurance company's thinking is this: People who work out are a lower risk than those who don't, so encouraging people to exercise will reduce their health problems and doctor's visits.
Rewards
-
Insurance companies offer several types of rewards: reimbursements, premium reductions, and redeemable points. An insurer may split the cost of a gym membership, cut a premium for a healthy employee or offer credit for certain accomplishments. The Los Angeles Times reports that employees at a dental laboratory in Ontario racked up points for certain accomplishments and traded them in for items such as televisions, video game systems and mp3 players.
Concerns
-
There is another cost to the employee, and that's privacy. Insurance carriers test and record employees' blood pressure and flexibility, and they may test nonsmokers for nicotine blood levels. Also, they may have access to a gym's member-card scanning system, which will tell them how frequently their policyholders exercise.
References
- Photo Credit "NCO continues to inspire" is Copyrighted by Flickr user: The U.S. Army under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
