Chamber meeting focuses on health care

WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. -- Health care affects the bottom line for businesses, and its impact gets more evident every year, said Sharon Covert, executive director of the Wellness Council of West Virginia.

As health care costs rise every year, business owners must act, she said Thursday during the 2008 West Virginia Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting at the Greenbrier Resort. They have to cut costs somehow, and among their small pool of options are increasing premiums, co-pay and deductibles for employees, or taking more drastic measures, such as not offering a health insurance program at all or simply cutting employees.

Another route is to help workers make better decisions regarding their health through a work-based wellness program.

"Wellness programs are effective business plans," Covert said. "Prevention costs less than treatment."

America spends $2.2 trillion each year on health care, more than any other industrialized nation in the world, Covert said. But it's nowhere near the healthiest, records show.

And the country's health-care costs have inflated dramatically. As a point of comparison, she said that a dozen eggs would cost $80 today if eggs had seen the same inflation rate as health care. A dozen oranges would cost $107.

The irony is that 70 percent of disease is preventable, Covert said, and 87 percent of health care costs are due to a person's lifestyle.

In most cases, "It's not an omniscient God with a deck of cards, and you get one that says, 'cancer' and someone else gets one that says 'high blood pressure' and someone else gets one that says, '90 years and a good life,'" Covert said. "It's the decisions you make every day."

For businesses, money is either coming in or going out, and what they spend on their employees' health care is money that can't be spent on capital investments, expansions and pay increases.

"We can't afford this," Covert said. Businesses come to the point where they have to make tough decisions, and any plan that isn't paying for itself needs to be gone, she said.

She offered some steps companies can follow to establish an effective workplace wellness program.

Companies first must prepare for it by making sure they have the backing of senior and middle management, and they need to select a wellness team that represents all departments and ranks of workers in the business.

Then they must assess the needs of the employees by finding out their interests and morale, and they must look at claims, workers' compensation, absenteeism and productivity.

If a business hosts a health fair where employees get screened, it's helpful to get information about what percentage of staff have high blood pressure or other ailments. And that's not a violation of federal health-care privacy laws, so long as names are not involved, just overall percentages, Covert said.

Businesses also need to do facility assessments. What's in the vending machines? Are there low-cost, healthy options in the cafeteria?

"A grilled chicken sandwich should cost less than two hot dogs," she said.

When it comes time to enact new offerings, include tobacco cessation, physical activity options, nutrition, alcohol and drug abuse prevention.

Audit vending machine offerings. Host healthy pot luck lunches. Bring a farmers market to the workplace, or bring in a massage therapist for chair massages on a regular basis, Covert said.

Everything comes down to stress, and if an employee is stressed at work or at home, it's going to affect performance, she added. So it's important to pay attention and listen.

And a wellness plan is enacted, evaluate its results, Covert said.

Covert's ideas have been proven effective, said Tom Jones, CEO of West Virginia United Health Care System Inc.

As a former administrator at St. Mary's Medical Center in Huntington and West Virginia University Hospitals in Morgantown, he's seen the program work, he said.

Another way to get staffers to take care of their health is to place health-care costs entirely into the employees' hands, other business owners said.

Phil Cline, general manager of Pullman Plaza Hotel who attended the business summit, said his company doesn't offer a health insurance plan to its 132 employees.

Some of them buy their own health insurance, he said.

"We can't afford it," he said. "It's amazing how many uninsured people don't need it. They take care of themselves. ... I go to the Y every morning."

His business, however, did offer $125 to employees to quit smoking, and just one quit.

John Stossel, co-anchor of ABC News "20/20," spoke at West Virginia Business Summit Thursday in opposition to government-mandated health insurance plans. His presentation focused on the hindrance of too much government regulation in the marketplace.

Competition alone keeps businesses in line, and government regulations cost too much and take too long to develop and enforce, he said.

In response to a question about whether health insurance is a human right, Stossel reminded the audience that business-sponsored health insurance became more widespread in the United States after World War II, because businesses couldn't offer employees enough pay. That was a long time ago.

Mandated health insurance would mean more government involvement, and that's something Stossel would like to avoid, he said.

"There is a difference between health care and health insurance," he said. "Some people don't have health insurance, but they do have health care, and I say that's OK. Insurance is a lousy way to pay for things."