What Is Driving Your Healthcare Costs

The American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine has summarized a decade of data that every CFO, benefits director and wellness committee should be able to recite from memory. The picture is not good, but it is actionable.

The chronic-disease tide

• Chronic conditions are rising in every age cohort in the United States — diabetes, heart disease, cancer and their precursors.
• Nearly half of all Americans have at least one chronic condition. Nearly half of that group has multiple.
• More than eighty percent of medical spending in the United States goes to the care of chronic conditions.
• A landmark Edington-lab analysis found that annual medical claims costs for people with five or more health risks were double the costs of those with two or fewer.

Five risks double the spend. Your risk profile is your P&L.

The aging-workforce fact

Between 2006 and 2016 the number of U.S. workers aged 55 – 64 grew by 36.5%. Workers 65 to 74 and older grew by 80%. By 2015, one in five American workers was 55 or older. Older workers bring deep expertise and, on average, more chronic conditions — conditions that require more care, cost more to treat, and disable more days per year than the conditions common in younger employees.

For employers providing health benefits and absorbing the costs of absenteeism and disability, this is not a trend to monitor. It is a present-tense budget problem.

The stress variable

Buried inside the chronic-disease statistics is a catalyst that is rarely itemized on the benefits dashboard: stress. Stress accelerates every risk factor on the list. It worsens hypertension, diabetes control, cardiovascular reactivity, sleep, weight. It predicts absenteeism. It predicts presenteeism — the person who is at the desk but not at the work. It predicts the downstream disability claim.

In 2019 the World Health Organization, for the first time, classified burnout as a medical condition with an official ICD designation — a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

What to do about it — seriously

If you want a fresh way to think about wellness, engagement, turnover and absenteeism, and you want your people to personally discover new levels of meaning and effectiveness at work and at home, you need a framework, not a gym discount. BestStressZone® is the framework. It engages, motivates and informs. The factors that contribute to stress are complex. The framework is simple. Participants leave with the capacity to:

• Accept stressors as inevitable conditions that require healthy response.
• Manage themselves more effectively in stressful situations.
• Achieve at their highest capacity without borrowing against their health.
• Recognize the difference between personal power (commitment, control, challenge) and endurance.
• Experience energy, satisfaction, happiness and productivity — and develop the clarity to maintain them.

References

1. Thorpe KE. Factors accounting for the rise in health-care spending in the United States. Public Health. 2006;20:1002–1007.
2. Chronic Conditions: Making the Case for Ongoing Care. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation & Partnership for Solutions, Johns Hopkins University, 2004.
3. Edington DW. Emerging research: a view from one research center. American Journal of Health Promotion, 2001;15:341–349.
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Older Workers, July 2008.
5. Summer L, O’Neill G, Shirey L. Chronic conditions: a challenge for the 21st century. National Academy on an Aging Society, 1999.