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More Proof That Employers Care

May 20th, 2007 Posted by Mark

If you want more proof that big employers in this country care about health care and the seemingly spiraling up and never ending costs of health care, check out the new alliance called the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease. It is made up of health care organizations as well as business and employers groups, labor unions, and university academics. The coalition claims to be bipartisan, meaning it represents both Republicans and Democrats, and its main goal is to make chronic disease, and the prevention of it, an important topic of debate in the 2008 presidential election.

The Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease offers a three point proposal to help bring the issue to the forefront, as well as how every day employees can fight the issue of chronic disease themselves. Point one is to make the stopping of cigarette smoking a top priority. The second point is to make eating healthy foods a priority. And the third step in the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease’s program is for Americans to get more exercise.

The reason that the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease thinks their cause is so important is because of the stats out there. According to health officials, chronic disease is the top cause of death in the United States—as many as 133 million Americans have a chronic disease, which is about 45 percent of the population. It is the reason for seven out of 10 deaths in the country, and costs as much as three quarters of every dollar that is spend on health care in America.

Obesity is included in this list, because the rates of obesity in this country have doubled since the year 1997. And experts say that of the big increase in health care costs in the country, about one third of that is directly linked to obesity.

Soon employers will not only have heat stress posters or cold stress posters, forklift safety posters and choking posters, but they will also include in their safety posters such things as the Eat 5 Vegetables and Fruits a Day poster, or the Exercise at Least 30 Minutes Every Day Poster.

Then again, we already do have such health posters as the Drug Free Poster and the No Smoking posters, which show that an employer such as yourself is dedicated to promoting a safer and healthier work environment for your employees. But truly, if the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease eventually gains traction and has more and more of an influence not only in national politics but in work places around the country, we could be seeing more employers giving safety brochures and putting up safety posters that promote healthier eating and healthier living.

That movement might have already started, and not necessarily with the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease’s help. According to a study from the Midwest Business Group on Health out of Chicago, as many as three out of five employers is already, or is planning to, give employees some form of encouragement to get them to live a healthier life. The study looked at 163 employers from around the United States, all of whom had more than 1000 employees.

Some of the things that these employers did to encourage wellness and healthy living include giving out gift cards to those employees who came to health fairs, or giving more rebates on health care insurance premiums to those employees who got physicals from their physicians, or giving their employees who need it free diabetes medication and treatment as long as they pursued their care of that chronic disease. These top notch employers tend to also allow their employees to pick doctors and hospitals based on how good those doctors and hospitals actually are, not on how cheap they are.