Many leading-edge employers have begun to create a culture of health in their workplace and have developed programs and incentives to help improve health behavior of their people. 

Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal featured an opinion piece called How Safeway is Cutting Healthcare Costs, by Steve Burd, CEO of Safeway.  Burd has long been an advocate of market-based solutions for the nation’s health crisis, and he summed up the problem in simple terms:

Safeway's plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity).

He further noted that majority of people at risk for these four disease states can actually prevent them.  Safeway has developed a health insurance model that rewards good behavior and penalizes bad behavior – not unlike the auto insurance industry – and it’s working.  They’ve been able to keep costs down and improve health outcomes and productivity.  We wholeheartedly agree with this approach, and believe that Business holds far more weight in addressing healthcare than Washington gives them credit for.  I sent the following note to the Journal which was published online:

Steve Burd is a hero to all proactive and pragmatic business leaders that want to do what is within their power to address the cost and productivity issues of healthcare. His thesis is clear and cogent and leverages the principles of healthcare consumerism.  The stale and regressive arguments from the left in the current health reform debate pale in comparison to this refreshing and effective views of a CEO who has first-hand experience of stimulating behavior change in middle-class and often transient workforce of supermarket employees. Let's hope that Congress takes a close look at his piece and listens to his sage advice.