To our new readers, while 2016 was the first time a Koop Award ever went to a company that harmed employees, 2016 wasn’t the first Koop Award ever to go to a company whose own data showed they fabricated results. Below is a history of one of the Koop Award’s Greatest Hits.

For those of you who haven’t been following the saga of the Nebraska state employee wellness program, here is a crash course, aka “Lies, Damn Lies, and the Nebraska State Wellness Program.”  If you have been following it, you can skip to the end for the latest installment, Mr. Goetzel’s cover-up of his cover-up.

By way of background, this program is called “wellnessoptions” (imagine e.e. cummings-meets-poking employees with needles-meets-a sticky spacebar).   They used to say the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire.  Likewise, wellnessoptions is neither optional, if you want a decent deal on healthcare, nor wellness. Instead of wellness, it features a hyperdiagnostic anti-employee jihad in which Health Fitness Corporation (HFC) diagnoses employees but does nothing about the diagnosis except take credit for it.

TIMELINE — PART ONE: HFC’S TROUSERS COMBUSTED

September 24, 2012, 2:00 PM

I read Health Fitness Corporation announcement that its customer, the state of Nebraska, won Ron Goetzel’s C. Everett Koop Award for program excellence.

September 24, 2012, 2:01 PM

I recognize that the cancer outcomes were obviously made up.  Until then, I hadn’t been following the Koop award closely enough to realize that making up outcomes was apparently one of the award criteria, as I later came to learn.

October 2012

I read the full write-up on the program and realize that not only were most of the other outcomes made up, but they had actually lied about saving the lives of cancer victims.  If you screen a few thousand people for colon cancer, you don’t find 514 cases of cancer, and you certainly don’t save their lives, as HFC was claiming.  And you absolutely don’t save money, as they were also claiming.  All this is even more true when you waive age-related guidelines and let anyone get screened, and encourage overscreening by sending out 140,000 letters to state employees graced with the picture of a beautiful young model way too young to be getting a colonoscopy.

How this invalid nonsense ever got by all the eagle-eyed Koop Committee members would be a mystery, except that HFC is a sponsor of the Koop Committee.

December 2012

I review the entire application and all the marketing materials.  It becomes obvious that the entire thing was made up, not just the cancer part. They claimed to save $4.2 million because 161 of their roughly 6000 participants reduced a risk factor.

The math is quite self-evident.  Suppose you doubled the number of participants who reduced risks to 312.  It stands to reason that you could save $8.4-million. Double it again to 624 and you save $16.8.

Now double it one more time. If 1,248 people out of those 6000 reduced one single risk factor, you’d save $31.6-million, which is about equal to the entire spending for all 6000 participants.  And of course most medical spending has nothing to do with identifying previously unrecognized risk factors, so this would be quite a feat. (Do you even know anyone under 65 who had a heart attack that could have been avoided by one more workplace screening?)

I later learn that all the Koop Award-winning program outcomes are made up, using exactly the same math.

November 2012 to June 2013

I try to contact the authorities, like Roger Wilson, who allegedly runs this program for the state, but no one seems to care. The rule of thumb in the wellness industry is that what you say counts.  What you do is pretty irrelevant.

June 20, 2013

Breakthrough: The Wall Street Journal editors decide that I am correct, and that the outcomes were made up.  Vik and I are allowed to publish this on their op-ed page.

July 14, 2013

Breakthrough again: Another very well-read blogger professes shock-and-awe that any vendor could lie so blatantly and apparently get away with it.

July 15, 2013

Breakthrough yet again: Ace reporter Martha Stoddard of the Omaha World Herald gets Dennis Richling of Health Fitness Corporation to admit that the outcomes — at least the “life-saving catches” of “early stage cancer” outcomes — were indeed made up.  Richling tries to spin his gaffe by calling the difference between “life-saving catches of early-stage cancer” and saying someone might possibly get cancer in the future “semantics.”   So, according to Richling, having cancer and not having cancer are the same thing.

February 1, 2014

The hilarious wellness industry smackdown Surviving Workplace Wellness is published.  Since the HFC Nebraska program had too many lies to fit on a page or two, it gets its own chapter.  Here’s the opening paragraph, which in all modesty I must admit is one of my favorite in the book.

February 23, 2014

Nebraska political blogger ReadMoreJoe picks up the scent.  He points out that this wellness program is an obvious fraud.  The problem is that the same posting is also exposing several other equally obvious frauds, so this one gets overlooked.

TIMELINE–PART TWO: GOETZEL STRIKES BACK

Ron Goetzel isn’t about to sit back and let his friends/sponsors/clients be pilloried for a little white lie about saving the lives of cancer victims who didn’t have cancer.

June 2, 2014

At the Health Datapalooza conference, Ron Goetzel, while admitting the Nebraska cancer outcomes data was made up, claims they/HFC still deserve the Koop Award because he somehow didn’t realize the data was made up at the time the award was granted.  And it is true that HFC didn’t actually announce they had made up the outcomes.  Ron would have had to actually read the materials to figure it out, same as I did.

September 2014

Ron Goetzel calls the Nebraska program a “best practice” in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine but refuses to answer any questions about the obvious mistakes and inconsistencies in the article.

November 2014

After knowing for 16 months that they had lied, Ron Goetzel, writing in Employee Benefit News, finally drops Nebraska from his list of best-practice programs:

Being a fair-minded person, I take it upon myself to congratulate him on his newfound sense of ethics.  I don’t specifically agree that what he did was ethical, because the ethical thing would have been to admit complicity, apologize, and revoke their Koop Award.  But I do say that Nebraska being dropped from the list of best practices means ethical “progress is definitely being made,” albeit from a low base.

Only 29 minutes elapses before Ron erases all my illusions about his honesty and re-adds Nebraska to the list of “best practice organizations.”

He also adds PepsiCo to the list.  I guess losing only $2 for every $1 you spend qualifies as such in wellness, where most organizations lose much more.

May 2015

In a rally-the-base invitation-only webinar, we are told that Ron has promoted the Nebraska program from “best practice” to “exemplar.”  It seems like the more obvious it becomes that the whole thing was fabricated, the more Mr. Goetzel worships its outcomes.

TIMELINE–PART THREE: RON STANDS ALONE

September 2015

WELCOA finally takes the fabricated case study of Nebraska’s outcomes off their website, 26 months after the fraud was admitted. Perhaps some pressure is being put on them to come clean, given that this is Nebraska’s program and they themselves are based in Omaha.

Just for the record, I’m not saying that an organization founded by all-you-can-eat cafeteria magnate “Warren Buffet” knowingly kept a false document on their site for those 26 months. History suggests they might just be slow learners.  [2016 update: WELCOA is under new management, and they appear to be doing a great job, as exemplified by their development of the Employee Health Program Code of Conduct.]

This means Ron Goetzel is literally the only person left who thinks it’s perfectly OK — indeed, a “best practice/exemplar” — to lie about saving the lives of cancer victims.  Good luck with that in the upcoming debate.  It’s him against the world.

Or, as he sees it, everybody’s out of step but Ronnie.

October 2015

Nebraska tentatively re-awards the wellness contract to Health Fitness Corporation.  I am looking over the precipice towards utter humiliation.

TIMELINE–PART FOUR: THE ORIGINAL DATA DISAPPEARS

November 2, 2015–the original cover-up, on the morning of the Great Debate

At our urging (and we must confess to delighting in creating this “Sting” operation), a third party alerted Mr. Goetzel to the fact that, his protestations to the contrary, the Koop Award Committee did know (even if they had somehow not seen the marketing materials quoted above) that Health Fitness Corporation was making fictitious claims about saving the lives of cancer victims.  It was right in the award application.  The original award application from Nebraska had originally stated (underlining is ours):

But then, a hour following the call from this third party the morning of the debate, the original award application suddenly read:

In the original application, this excerpt appears in a letter from the Governor of Nebraska. Only now the Governor’s letter says the opposite what he actually wrote.  In the real world, this would be considered forgery.  In wellness, a forged cover-up of a blatant and admitted lie about saving the lives of cancer victims who didn’t have cancer is considered business as usual. Johns Hopkins and Truven (Ron’s employers) don’t seem to mind either.

April 2016

The state is rescinding its award to Health Fitness and terminating its wellness program. In the immortal words of the great philosopher Stewey Griffin, victory is mine.

September 2016: The cover-up of the cover-up

Mr. Goetzel finally acknowledges that Health Fitness Corporation told a whopper, and the Koop Committee accidentally overlooked it. He now calls this an “erratum.”  The technical term for it is a “lie-um.”  You can’t forge official state documents and then call the whole thing an “erratum.”  Is a robber allowed to give the money back after he gets caught and just uncommit the crime?

So now, having admitted that the award-winning vendor told the biggest lie in wellness history (once again, quite a feat), and knowing that all the obviously fabricated outcomes were mathematically impossible, and that waiving age restrictions for screening is akin to waiving age restrictions for buying beer, the Koop Committee finally, after 4 years, rescinded the Nebraska award.

Haha. No one falls for that line any more.  Quite the opposite, they are doubling down. They say that whopping lies like this one don’t matter, if you are an award sponsor. You get to keep your award.

Ditto, if your entire claim of “separation” between participants and non-participants is shown to be false but you are sponsor, Ron merely doctors the data and you get to keep your award.

Also, if it turns out you lied about your savings because there was no change in the biometrics to attribute the savings to, but Ron was a consultant on your project, you get to keep your award.

Likewise and as was confirmed in 2016, if you are a committee member, as Wellsteps’ CEO was until recently, despite your own data showing that you actually harmed employees, you get to keep your award.

Bottom line: as a friend-of-Ron, you might get to keep your award even if you shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.