The Dark Side of Wellness at Penn State

Rising employee healthcare costs are the bane of employers across the country. HR departments deal with the issue of providing benefits while keeping expenses manageable. Wellness programs are one possible solution to this quandry - healthy employees need fewer services. But wellness itself may have costs as well. Recently, Pennsylvania State University launched its own wellness program, Taking Care of Your Health. However, in order to encourage participation, PSU chose a coercive stick rather than a carrot approach.

The plan requires nonunion employees, like professors and clerical staff members, to visit their doctors for a checkup, undergo several biometric tests and submit to an extensive online health risk questionnaire that asks, among other questions, whether they have recently had problems with a co-worker, a supervisor or a divorce. If they don’t fill out the form, $100 a month will be deducted from their pay for noncompliance. Employees who do participate will receive detailed feedback on how to address their health issues.

At a university where some employees earn less than $50,000 annually, the faculty members contended that an $1,200 annual surcharge for nonparticipation — or $2,400 if the employee has a spouse or domestic partner on the school’s plan when that person has the option of coverage from his or her own employer — amounted to a strong-arm tactic. What’s more, they argued, the online questionnaire required them to give intimate information about their medical history, finances, marital status and job-related stress to an outside company, WebMD Health Services, a health management firm that operates separately from the popular consumer site, WebMD.com.

This has sparked calls for a faculty insurrection. 

Over at The Healthcare Blog, Vik Khanna and Al Lewis suggest an alternative strategy for the outraged faculty.

... However, there is an alternative approach, and one that will break the bank in HR: get every preventive test possible and then get all the follow-up care you can for every conceivable dubious or positive result, many of which will be false positives.  Faculty should also use their paid time off to rest up from the physical and emotional stress of getting all this unnecessary medical care and perhaps even think about filing workers comp claims since these stressors are all directly job related.

PSU administrators thought they could slip this coercive program in during the summer downtime and that the white collar faculty, without benefit of union strong arms, would simply rollover and comply. They chose ... poorly.