There are three ways to win a debate:

1. Cite facts that support your position.
2. Be smart enough to win a debate even though the facts go the other way.
3. Break your opponent’s microphone.

Let’s consider each possibility in turn:

1. Not a chance–Wellsteps won a Koop Award. When was the last time you saw a bona fide fact in a Koop Award application? Certainly STATNews doesn’t seem to have found any. And if Wellsteps had an actual fact in their favor — meaning if we were wrong about one single solitary thing — don’t you suppose they would have stumbled onto it by now?  Don’t you suppose that just one of their insults would be grounded in reality?  In the immortal words of the great philosopher Rick Perry, even a broken clock is right once a day, so the score is: Broken Clocks 1, Wellsteps 0.
2. Smart? Hello! We’re talking Steve Aldana and Wellsteps here, not to mention Troy Adams, the originator of the Wellsteps tag line: “It’s fun to get fat. It’s fun to be lazy.“
3. Bingo. That’s what Wellsteps just tried to do. When all else fails, cheat.  They tried to get Linkedin to shut us down for “bullying” them by adding up their own numbers.  Here is their exact “update,” which they were kind enough to put in red so you can’t miss it.  To paraphrase the immortal words of the great philosopher Michelle Obama, when they go low, we go paste:

And yet you may have just clicked through to this post from Linkedin, meaning that reports of our death (me and Jon Robison of Salveo Partners) are greatly exaggerated.

The irony is, Wellsteps doesn’t understand irony

The irony is, what greater form of bullying is there than to try to muzzle someone whose only crime was to agree with Wellsteps’ own data?

The other irony is, Wellsteps’ CEO recently wrote: “We certainly support free speech:”

It has come to our attention that an outspoken critic has entered false data into these calculators in order to make a point. We certainly support free speech; however, we wonder how valid the point can be when it is based on false data?”

I guess, to paraphrase the immortal words of the great philosopher John Kerry, Mr. Aldana was for free speech before he was against it. (Is “entering false data” like “bearing false witness”? If so, we yield to Wellsteps’ expertise.  And we did enter every combination of data imaginable into their “calculator.” It always gave the same answer. Try it. It’s like wellness savings measurement-meets-Fisher-Price. Just make sure to zero out inflation.)

Being in the “integrity segment” of this industry, we aren’t exactly big fans of Ron Goetzel, and the longer he lets his cronies at Wellsteps keep their Koop Award, despite it now being well-established that they harmed employees in multiple ways, the more his own sullied reputation suffers. However, we will acknowledge one thing that Ron Goetzel excels at, and that’s ignorance. He is great at ignoring facts, ignoring data…and, most strategically, ignoring us. Indeed, as the leader of the Koop and HERO cabals, he inspired the collective noun “the Wellness Ignorati.”  He knows better than to debate us, because the Wellness Ignorati always lose debates, even when they break our microphone.