In the immortal words of the great philosopher Britney Spears, oops, they’re at it again.

How this “study” gets published and why Johns Hopkins would allow its name to be used on it is anyone’s guess.  In our last posting, we pointed out that in one place Graco’s employees cost $11,100 apiece to insure, just like other companies that offer competitive benefits.  Yet later on in the story we see that employees only cost $2280.  No mention of how these figures could be so inconsistent.

We let the rest of the study go, figuring we had already found the Macguffin.  Ace reporter Bob Merberg, though, was not so easily convinced.

We’d urge reading his blog.  Among the claims made by Mr. Goetzel was “revenues have doubled since 2009.”  Well, yeah, but:

(1) it turns out Graco made a sizable acquisition in 2012, which might have had a teeny-weeny effect on revenues;

(2) revenues had plummeted in 2009, the year after the wellness program was introduced.

If you (a) measure from 2008, the year the wellness program was introduced, instead of cherrypicking the baseline year to give the best result, and (b) factor out the acquisition, revenues over the 2008-2014 period have pretty much tracked the economy as a whole.  So nothing happened.

Try the Quizzify demo and see how many you get right.

We can’t make this stuff up.  Fortunately we don’t have to.