What is the best possible way to lower health care costs? Many people, including Oakland University Marketing Professor Mukesh Bhargava, believe that it is wellness programs. Wellness programs, and social engineering.
Currently two thirds of all companies have some sort of wellness program, which can range from flu shots, to health screenings to fitness programs. These programs are supposed to motivate people to take care of themselves, leading to a decrease in costs for an organization. Currently, the way organizations reduce costs is by reducing coverage and increasing co-pays.
When Professor Bhargava was part of the wellness program at Oakland University, the employees were measured for vital statistics, told their ideal body measurements, and what exercises they needed to do to reach those goals. There was one advisor for a group of four employees and they kept track of progress. Although Professor Bhargava believes wellness programs are the way to go, he admits he was not serious about it at first. In fact, it wasn’t until he was out of the program that he became serious about his health. He says it got him used to going to the gym, “in the short run the program didn’t work, but a year later I started going to the gym.”
Professor Bhargava eventually began to take the program seriously, but how can employers convince all employees to do this? The Professor uses the example of smoking. People who smoke get their insurance rates bumped up, but usually this negative incentive is not enough to get them to quit. He believes that small positive incentives would be better at motivating employees. What exactly those incentives should be would depend on the situation.
Smoking is also socially unacceptable. Smokers are forced to go outside, people do not like the smell, etc. In order to increase overall health, unhealthy foods need to be equally socially unacceptable. Professor Bhargava reference the book Nudge by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, which argues for “libertarian paternalism.” He says it is about letting people choose, but choosing among the right things, like choosing from three types of salad. “Depending on the order of the items on the menu people change their choices from 30-40%,” he says.
Why would restaurants bother doing this on their own, won’t it take government action to force restaurants to be health conscious? “The government should not get involved with this,” he says, “McDonald’s doesn’t score in terms of what people want, if they are smart they will do something about it with the young.”
Regardless of whether or not the government should be getting involved, they are. The Senate is working on a bill that would require restaurant chains to post the calorie count on the menu, and this is already the law in New York City.
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We’re all better off if we can raise the awareness of the nutritional value of what we consume. Unfortunately, foods that taste the best - are often the worst for you (my opinion). This isn't always true, but rather a general observation. Although there are some individuals that enjoy guiltless satisfaction with over-indulging, I've found that most will choose the healthier fork in the road if given the obvious choice. I would venture to argue that there is a correlation between age and healthier eating habits. The older we become, the more we try (awareness) to make more health conscious decisions in what we eat. The problem is in providing the right information in order to make the right decisions. If I knew the calorie intake of foods & beverages prepared at service institutions, I would have the required information to choose a healthier menu item; thereby improving my long-term health.
ReplyDeleteI'm generally not fond of government intervening with business operations, but feel that forcing restaurants to post nutritional information about their menu items is worth more discussion. Although the individual consumers could become healthier in their choice, the burden of cost to provide such information would fall upon the restaurant owners. Compliance of restaurant owners to provide this information to consumers may not be a trivial incremental fee.
The cost impact would be incurred by introducing new recipe & formula management processes, but also in loss of sales to existing menu items. If they post nutritional information, the high selling items would be cannibalized by other healthier choices and/or new menu items would need to be introduced as suitable substitutes. Whether or not government intervenes here, I see this issue as both a challenge and opportunity for restaurant owners, calculating & displaying nutritional information on menu items could possibly revolutionize the restaurant industry.
I can imagine software developers offering a formula & recipe management solution that is integrated with supplier and customer data. It wouldn’t be very difficult to figure out what ingredients, what formula, the calorie intake and other nutritional information that went into a menu order. More interesting though would be to tie which suppliers were used to source the raw materials that went into the menu order that was placed and delivered at 7/22/2009 at 10:12AM. In addition, since many customers pay by credit card, we could also match the nutritional information with a specific customer. Think about the possibilities? If a specific customer became ill, we could quickly figure out which restaurant or which vendor supplied the raw materials. Not only can we calculate and provide nutritional information to the buying customer, we can also display that same information on the customers billing statement for a record of how many calories were consumed.
Where there is a challenge, there typically is a corresponding business opportunity.
Dr.Bhargava you have mentioned crucial issues in your article, because people are different and problems are different but we use same kind of approach to treat the patients, Like in your case you haven't seen the change in a short time but what motivated you to keep on going to gym is the important factor. Some of wise people like you continue to sustain their effort till they see the difference once the change is appreciated it is like a rewarding phenomenon, it will automatically motivate people. But in general our US population this is the problem, people try different things trying to find some instant solution, trying different things not only waste dolllars and time but also create frustration which further leads to more bad decisions, bottom line is unless the attitude of people change it is hard to reduce the health care costs.
ReplyDeleteThe key for this could be health education spending more on preventing programs.Utilyzing the IT to it's best, Encouraging health care providers for quality rather than quantity. providing them more liberty to do the best for the patients based on the evidence based medicine but not based on other conditions, Behaviour incentives for physicians as well as good patients might make a difference in the current healthcare delivery and utilization leading to reduced costs to some extent.This is simple to say but the actual problem is even more complex right from legislaters,pharmaceutical companies,Insurance companies,hopitals,
healthcare providers to patients themselves unless there exists common system throughout the country, discipline and strict law it is hard to control the healthcare muda(wastage in Japanese).