Corporate Health and Wellness Programs

We should look closely at corporate health and wellness programs as a way of reversing the mounting costs of health care. While the debate over the past years has focused on including wider coverage in health care coverage, too little attention has been focused on ways to lower the costs of health care coverage. We believe the best solutions will be found by focusing on wellness -- particularly worksite wellness.

Why? Wellness programs focus on reducing the risk of the need for health care. While the out of pocket cost benefits of individual wellness are not near term, they increasingly are for company health and wellness programs. Indeed, we now can document the positive return on investment for comprehensive corporate wellness programs [http://wellness-program-roi.richarddowell.info].

Given that the bottom line can be improved, the challenge is to provide additional stimulus to companies to move toward wellness. There are a number of approaches for doing this. We favor promoting community action involving wellness providers, business, government and community wellness champions.

We believe that community service organizations such at Rotary would be ideal champions of community wellness advocacy efforts. It can start with promoting individual and community wellness programs which can then provide incentives for companies to become supporting partners.

Local, State and federal government actions to eliminate unnecessary health care system costs can further contribute to reducing the cost of health care. We feel that investing in providing incentives to health care organizations to achieve such efficiencies would also provide a positive return on the investment of tax dollars.

We invite you to share your thoughts and recommendations below.

What can we do to promote Corporate Health and Wellness programs as a way to reduce health care costs?

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