Healthy Workforce 2010 and Beyond

Introduction

Since the publication of Healthy Workforce 2010 in 2001, there has been a dramatic shift in the mindset of employers regarding employee health care and its impact on their respective bottom lines. The new consensus is that current and future spending in employee health is not only unsustainable, but also poses a significant threat to the overall competitiveness of American businesses within the global marketplace.

Recently, employers have implemented a number of approaches not only to manage the supply of health care resources, but also the demand, namely through greater cost-shifting to the employee. However, leading organizations have realized that managing health benefit costs is a matter of dwindling returns unless they learn to manage health behaviors concurrently. One popular strategy is to focus employee health efforts on primary prevention and risk avoidance, thus keeping the majority of the workforce (and its dependents) low risk and healthy. Why?

First, as illustrated in the graph below, a significant percentage of deaths in the United States are associated primarily with modifiable, lifestyle-related behaviors.2,3 Remarkably, more than one-third of total mortality is attributed to just three general factors: tobacco use, poor diet/low physical activity (and their influence on obesity),
and excessive alcohol consumption.