Goofus and Gallant is a Highlights for Children feature contrasting different behaviors.  Example:

Viverae’s and Quizzify’s guarantees lend themselves to this type of comparison. Honestly, we don’t even know if Viverae still offer theirs. Nonetheless, through the years a number of people have sent it to us and asked for our help interpreting it. (That’s a polite phrasing of what the emails said, and of course we are nothing if not polite.)  It provides an excellent opportunity to learn how to read a guarantee with a discerning eye, and we thank Viverae for offering it and hope they too are able to gain some insights from our analysis of it.

Here is Viverae’s guarantee, which we will review clause by clause:

Goofus: Viverae’s Clause #1 doesn’t allow any leeway in program design.

Gallant: Quizzify offers the guarantee even if you want to tweak the program design.

Goofus: Viverae’s Clause #2 is an EEOC violation. You can’t “require” employees to do biometric screens. The program wouldn’t be voluntary. You might as well just send a memo to your employees with the phone number of the EEOC and tell them to sue you.

Gallant: Quizzify guarantees no EEOC lawsuits, and actually indemnifies against them.

Goofus: Viverae’s Clause #3 would seem fairly self-evident–except that in wellness, as the example at the end of this posting* shows,  some wellness vendors don’t know there are 12 months in a year.

Gallant: Quizzify assumes its customers know that a year has 12 months in it, so this clause isn’t part of our guarantee.

Goofus: Viverae’s Clause #4 requires you to not only sign up for 3 years to get this 20% guarantee in the third year only, but also to waive your rights to early termination.  So basically they are saying: “If you sign up for 3 years with no ‘out’ clause, we might possibly give you a guarantee worth 6.67%/year on average, assuming we measure validly.”

Gallant: Quizzify’s price list offers customers discounts exceeding 6.7% a year for multiyear contracts anyway, even before any guarantee, and allows not-for-cause termination for a small upcharge.

Gallant: Quizzify’s guarantee is 100% in all years, not 20% in year 3.

Goofus: Viverae’s Clause #5 requires a minimum number of 1000 employees, making it off-limits to more than 98% of America’s employers.

Gallant: Quizzify offers a straight 100% satisfaction guarantee if the number of eligible employees is too small to measure savings objectively.

Goofus: Viverae’s employee incentive/penalty requirement in Clause #6 is the “maximum allowed by law.”

Gallant: Quizzify requires a minimum incentive of only $100. We believe that the program should be attractive enough that you don’t need to force employees to participate.

Goofus: Viverae’s Clause #7 requires all carriers and PBMs for all years to turn over all employee-identifiable claims files. Since Viverae is not HIPAA-compliant, that creates a HIPAA issue.  (In all fairness to Viverae, most wellness vendors are not HIPAA-compliant. Quizzify is the exception.  Quizzify doesn’t collect or store private health information, so HIPAA doesn’t apply.)

It also means Viverae determines how much money Viverae saved, with no oversight.

Gallant: Quizzify allows the customer or its consultant to complete its simple claims extraction algorithm and determine savings, or Quizzify can do it for them. Its claims extraction algorithm is the industry standard required by the Intel-GE Care Innovations Validation Institute.

Speaking of the Validation Institute, Goofus’s guarantee is not validated by them.

Quizzify’s is.

Postscript:

Gallant reminds readers that both he and Goofus are trademarks of Highlights for Children so don’t even think about using these characters without attribution.

Goofus sprinkles Gallant’s DNA at crime scenes.

*Avivia “three-year” study of drug adherence:

If you like this example, you’ll love This Is Your Brain on Wellness