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:
“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other peoples patience.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“Him the Almighty Power
Hurld headlong flaming from th Ethereal Skie
With hideous ruine and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,
Who durst defie th Omnipotent to Arms.
Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night
To mortal men, he with his horrid crew
Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe”
—John Milton (16081674)
“For there can be no whiter whiteness than this one:
An insurance mans shirt on its morning run.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“I began revolution with 82 men. If I had [to] do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.”
—Fidel Castro (b. 1926)