C. Everett Koop National Health Award Committee,

Wellness Council of America and Health Fitness Corp.

Short Summary of Award:

The C. Everett Koop award committee’s mission is:

“…to seek out, evaluate, promote and distribute programs with demonstrated effectiveness in influencing personal health habits and the cost effective use of health care services. These programs have the objectives of

• Providing appropriate quality care
• Sharply reducing the alarming rate of health care inflation, by holding down unnecessary expenditures.”

Materials Being Reviewed:

The brochure in question describing the Nebraska program is downloadable from the WELCOA website.

Case Study of Award Winner for 2012: Health Fitness Corporation and Nebraska

Summary of key figures and outcomes:

Alleged cancer outcomes include the following:

Risk reduction outcomes include the following:

Questions for C. Everett Koop Award Committee:

I: Alleged Cancer Outcomes

Were you troubled by the program sponsors’ decision to waive all age-related colon cancer screening guidelines established by the government, and send out 140,000 flyers, at taxpayer expense, featuring a beautiful woman much too young to have a screening colonoscopy?

ANS: Refused to answer

How come, when the program reported that 514 of the 5000 (or fewer) people screened had colon cancer (in addition to the ones who would have been screened anyway), none of the Committee members with health informatics backgrounds from Truven Health Analytics and Mercer and Milliman (and from Wellsteps and Staywell, both of whose programs are also highlighted) were concerned that this alleged 11% colon cancer rate was at least 100 times greater than Love Canal’s?

ANS: Refused to answer

When Health Fitness Corporation admitted lying and reversed their story from making “life saving, cost-saving catches” of “early stage [colon] cancer” to revealing that those 514 people didn’t have cancer, why did the Koop Committee re-endorse what would appear to be outright data falsification, instead of rescinding the award?

ANS: Refused to answer

Even if the committee is allowing Health Fitness Corporation to keep its award and not even apologize, why does this claim of “life-saving, cost-saving catches” still appear on the WELCOA website even though the lie has been admitted?

ANS: Refused to answer

Wouldn’t the fact that the perpetrator of this acknowledged lie is also a sponsor of this Koop award that its own customers have won three times (including this incident) create the perception of a conflict of interest?

ANS: Refused to answer

Does anyone on the Committee think if Dr. Koop were still alive that he would endorse your position on data falsification of cancer victims?

ANS: Refused to answer

WELCOA’s website said it was founded by someone who appears to be the inventor of the self-serve all-you-can-eat restaurant. Despite his well-deserved reputation for integrity, did he endorse data falsification of cancer victims even after the perpetrators admitted it?

ANS: Refused to answer (but did change the spelling)

II: Risk Reduction Outcomes

How do you reconcile the claimed savings figure exceeding $4-million with your own chart above showing that only 161 active participants (3.1%) reduced a risk factor? (That chart of course doesn’t include dropouts and non-participants, whose risk factors may have increased.)

ANS: Refused to answer

Dividing the total savings by 161 yields more than $20,000/person in savings. Wouldn’t that $20,000+ for each risk factor avoided imply that all 161 would have had a heart attack even though the entire eligible population only had about 30 heart attacks the previous year, while the participating population would have had about 7?

ANS: Refused to answer

How do you reconcile your statement that 40% of the population had previously undiagnosed high blood pressure or high cholesterol with your other statement that “the total number of prescription scripts [sic] filled within the Wellness Plan reduced [sic] 3% last year,” despite your reducing or waiving the copays? Shouldn’t prescriptions have gone up, if indeed 40% more people were at risk?

ANS: Refused to answer

How can you attribute the 3% reduction in prescriptions to “improved lifestyles” with the fact that your own graph shows only 161 people improved their lifestyles enough to reduce a risk factor? What happened to the thousands who were diagnosed but were neither medicated nor improved their lifestyles?

ANS: Refused to answer

How do you reconcile that same finding – that 40% had high blood pressure or cholesterol — with that same graph, showing that almost three-quarters of the population was low-risk?

ANS: Refused to answer

How do you reconcile the brochure’s claim that the “majority of employees touted how the program has improved their lives” with the brochure’s own admission that only a minority of employees (42%) even bothered to be screened once and only 25% twice despite the four-figure financial incentive?

ANS: Refused to answer

Follow-up response

Not-for-attribution response received August 1, stating that the reason the Committee let them keep their award was not because were a sponsor but rather because they did not make the life-saving claim on their application.  (They did make all the other invalid claims.)  Because they didn’t make the claim on the application, they are not in violation of the Committee’s ethical standards by making it in other venues.

Our reaction:

So it is OK if a ballplayer admits using steroids as long as he didn’t happen to test positive?

Follow-Up Response

September 2014: Nebraska listed as a “best practice program” by Ron Goetzel

Our Reaction:

Doesn’t this listing contradict your initial excuse — that you forgot to ask them about whether they made up their cancer statistics during your due diligence — because now you know about that lie and all the other lies in their outcomes measurement…and yet you still call them a best-practice program?