Who says you need blood pressure?

Believe it or not, we do actually have day jobs, but our “presenteeism” spikes when we are asked to provide color commentary in the ongoing competition among wellness vendors trying to out-stupid one another.  We try to highlight every competitor, but they multiply faster than the brooms in Fantasia.   For those of us in the Welligentsia who like to flaunt our mastery of fifth grade math, wellness is truly, as one pundit noted, a target-rich environment.

The current winner of the Cluelessness Olympics, Wellness Innovations, has been nominated multiple times following their article in Corporate Wellness.  Corporate Wellness is the Corporate Health and Wellness Association’s “official” magazine.  One shudders to imagine the fact-checking standards of the bootleg versions.

While the whole article is a must-read to learn how to achieve a 17-to-1 “estimated 2-year return in 19 months,” the highlight would be Wellness Innovations’ randomly generated outcomes calculations:

Wellness Innovations didn’t name the company that instituted the program — and a good thing, because their employees’ next-of-kins might be insisting on survivor benefits since the average participant, according to the fourth bullet point, no longer has a pulse.  (The good news is that, according to their website, one of their other customers is a chain of funeral homes.)

However, they did say this company was a “respectable” one with 43 employees. Yes, this entire 2000-word article was written about 43 employees, giving it the highest word count per employee of any wellness article ever.

Employees who Quizzify maintain a healthy blood pressure and pulse

Oh, and did we mention Wellness Innovations made up their numbers?  According to the article, they spent 5.5% of their healthcare budget on wellness, and achieved a 17-to-1 ROI. The problem, as any fifth grader can tell you, is saving that much money arithmetically wipes out almost all your healthcare spending–leaving only enough to spend on the employee who has a disease that “went unnoticed by the PCP for 12 years” but who is now being managed by “a team of physicians and professionals.”

Thank goodness Wellness Innovations caught this dread disease and got a team of physicians on the case, or it might have gone unnoticed for another 12 years.