Safeway Inc. - Healthy Measures Employee Insurance Plan

Healthy Measures Employee Insurance Plan

Safeway has designed an innovative, market-based employee health insurance plan that has kept per capita health-care costs flat between 2005 and 2009 (including both the employee and the employer portion), while most American companies' costs have increased 38% over the same four years.

The Safeway Healthy Measures plan capitalizes on two key insights. The first is 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior. The second insight is 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic conditions: cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity. Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is preventable. Safeway's insurance program focuses on tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels, using a provision in the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that permits employers to differentiate premiums based on behaviors.

Safeway's Healthy Measures program is completely voluntary and currently covers 74% of the insured nonunion work force. Employees are tested for the four measures cited above and receive premium discounts off a "base level" premium for each test they pass. Data are collected by outside parties and not shared with company management. If they pass all four tests, annual premiums are reduced $780 for individuals and $1,560 for families. Should they fail any or all tests, they can be tested again in 12 months. If they pass or have made appropriate progress on something like obesity, the company provides a refund equal to the premium differences established at the beginning of the plan year.

Read more about this topic:  Safeway Inc.

Famous quotes containing the words healthy, measures, insurance and/or plan:

    The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.
    Jane Austen (1775–1817)

    I was surprised by Joe’s asking me how far it was to the Moosehorn. He was pretty well acquainted with this stream, but he had noticed that I was curious about distances, and had several maps. He and Indians generally, with whom I have talked, are not able to describe dimensions or distances in our measures with any accuracy. He could tell, perhaps, at what time we should arrive, but not how far it was.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The Republican convention, an event with the intellectual content of a Guns’n’Roses lyric attended by every ofay insurance broker in America who owns a pair of white shoes.
    —P.J. (Patrick Jake)

    Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
    That every man in arms should wish to be?
    It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
    Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
    Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:
    Whose high endeavors are an inward light
    That makes the path before him always bright:
    Who, with a natural instinct to discern
    What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
    And in himself posses his own desire;
    William Wordsworth (1770–1850)