Insurers charging companies more if workers have unhealthy lifestyles

Download PDF Copy

Nov 19 2011

A Towers Watson survey found that the percentage of employer-sponsored policies that impose lifestyle-related financial penalities have doubled in the last two years.

The New York Times: The Smokers' Surcharge
More and more employers are demanding that workers who smoke, are overweight or have high cholesterol shoulder a greater share of their health care costs, a shift toward penalizing employees with unhealthy lifestyles rather than rewarding good habits. ... In addition, another survey released on Wednesday by Mercer, which advises companies, showed that about a third of employers with 500 or more workers were trying to coax them into wellness programs by offering financial incentives, like discounts on their insurance (Abelson, 11/16).

Marketplace: Higher Premiums For Unhealthy Lifestyles
Nineteen percent of employers charge some kind of penalty to workers who smoke or are obese or have high cholesterol. That's according to a survey by the consulting firm Towers Watson. The same survey found that twice as many companies will put in those penalties next year (Warner, 11/17).

Related, earlier KHN story: Carrot-And-Stick Health Plans Aim To Cut Costs (Appleby, 3/11/2010).

This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.