Does Reform Matter to Employers?
Health Care Reform Revisited: Part II
An opinion piece by
Sean Sullivan, JD
Co-Founder, President & CEO, IHPM
For the past several years, IHPM has been developing a presence and an action agenda around health and productivity management (HPM) in other parts of the world – most particularly China, but also other Pacific Rim countries and now in Latin America. In addition, the Institute has been holding annual European HPM Forums in different countries for a decade, and plans to enter India in 2012.
Two key factors have enlarged our strategic map from North America to the rest of the world: (1) the need to follow our health and productivity leaders like Dow Chemical, Intel, Navistar International and Unilever around the globe; and (2) our discovery that the strong connection between employee health and workplace performance is grasped more readily outside the United States, where employers are not obsessed with rising medical costs that they don’t directly see.
More myopic employers here in the U.S. have, until lately, been focused on medical costs that have been rising right before their eyes to occupy their entire field of vision. Now, with mounting evidence from HPM programs to back it, employee health finally is being seen more and more as part of the productive value of a company’s “human capital”, and the reasons for investing in "wellness" and in "disease management" programs are becoming divorced from the traditional rationale for providing health care benefits to employees – which has been to “insure” them against the financial costs of illness.
More employers all the time are understanding that the real economic reason for taking some responsibility for keeping employees healthy is to maintain or even increase their productivity. At the same time, the growing unaffordability of a “sick care” system has been pointing toward a change in health insurance arrangements – away from cost reimbursement that has continually increased utilization and spending for medical services by removing individual incentives to stay healthy, and back toward a true insurance model that protects employees against financial catastrophe while encouraging their responsible behavior.
The rational economic shift that has been going on in the private insurance sector toward a “consumer choice” model for health benefits, which many employers have been promoting and more employees choosing, runs counter to the thrust of sweeping national health care “reform” that either mandates employers to continue providing costlier comprehensive coverage or gives them a good reason to dump their employees into the proposed insurance exchanges – hastening the collapse of the private insurance market and the establishment of a single-payer system like Canada’s or Britain’s. (of course, it remains to be seen if ObamaCare will survive the challenge to its legitimacy under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution).
However “reform” plays itself out with respect to traditional employer-sponsored health benefit plans, employers will continue investing in the “human capital asset” value of health for the return it produces in better workplace performance. This is happening around the world under publicly financed health care systems and mixed models alike, and it will happen here in the United States if we move in that direction – or if we don’t! ObamaCare ignores health and productivity management and, consequently, is largely irrelevant to the future for savvy employers because that future does not depend on what ObamaCare seeks to control – it depends on the value of employee health as a business asset.
For more information about IHPM, visit: www.ihpm.org
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Sean Sullivan is co-founder, President and CEO of the Institute for Health and Productivity Management (IHPM) – a global enterprise working with employers to improve their employees’ health and maximize its impact on business performance. Since its founding in 1997 the Institute has served as the catalyst and champion of an expanding international movement to make health a leading human capital asset for the 21st century.
Sullivan spent ten years as a Washington-based health policy analyst as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He is the author of articles and monographs on health policy and health care market trends, and has testified on these subjects before Congress and state legislatures.
He speaks both nationally and internationally on health and productivity management as a leading business strategy for the modern knowledge-based economy.
Mr. Sullivan holds degrees in economics from Harvard, and law from Stanford.
If you are interested in contacting Mr. Sullivan please contact Deborah Love at deborah@ihpm.org or call 480.305.2100.
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About The Institute for Health and Productivity Management (IHPM)
The Institute for Health and Productivity Management (IHPM) is a Global Enterprise created in 1997 to establish the full value of employee health and maximize its impact on business performance. It does this by helping employers to:
- Identify the total cost impact of employee health on business performance – including lost productivity;
- Choose the best opportunities to reduce this cost impact by improving health and performance;
- Measure the success of their efforts.
IHPM works with all who have a stake in employee health: employers, providers, suppliers, health plans and workers themselves. Through its national advisory groups and an expanding network of alliances and affiliates, the Institute is building the evidence-based business case for improving health to produce gains in productivity.
Mission
The Mission of the Institute is to establish the full value of employee health as a business asset – as human capital -- and an investment in corporate performance. IHPM pursues this mission by:
- serving as a global resource on health and productivity management – in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, the UK, and Asia;
- developing the tools, metrics, and methods to drive and measure better health and resulting corporate performance;
- championing investment in health capital as a global strategy for corporate success;
- educating and equipping purchasers and providers to gain greater value from improving employee health.
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