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Aon giving Goetzel and Wellsteps a run for their money in the integrity department

May 14, 2025 9:14 am / Leave a comment

The misstatements of the latter two have been well-documented in these pages. Simply search on either name, assuming your internet connection has enough “bars” to capture all the content

Lately Aon has been playing catchup.  First with Accolade. Then Lyra.  Then it got caught (I need to add “allegedly”) taking money from PBMs.

And now, they are claiming that weight loss drugs save money.  Coincidentally, they offer a program (meaning take someone else’s program and mark it up) to “help” employers square this circle.

My “observations” on their arithmetic, such as it is, got picked up by The Health Care Blog, so i would encourage everyone to read them there.

Aon finally shows their hand. It’s in the cookie jar.

January 30, 2025 9:42 am / 5 Comments on Aon finally shows their hand. It’s in the cookie jar.

Aon’s claims of savings for the companies such as Lyra and Accolade that retain them to “show savings” appeared to be so obviously fabricated that I thought: “Wow, no actuary could possibly be this stupid and/or this dishonest.”

Then I saw they likely had their hand in the PBM cookie jar as well, allegedly collecting money from Express Scripts to steer Johnson & Johnson to them and not hiding it well enough to avoid being caught.  So I thought, maybe they are this stupid and/or dishonest.

But before I actually came out and said: “Aon is stupid and/or dishonest,” I thought I should write to them and ask if perhaps I was the one who was missing something. So I wrote to them on Linkedin and asked to get back to me by Tuesday to correct any mistakes in those analyses linked above.

They apparently read those analyses and did not respond.  Just to make sure they had every opportunity to correct any mistakes, I then wrote to their chief actuary on Linkedin on email on Tuesday to give them another extension:

Dear Mr. Ozminkowski,
I know you saw my letter on Linkedin. (I had not remembered that I had your regular email.) And you reviewed my dismantling of your Lyra report on my personal website.  I am about to post the summary, which is that you are refusing to defend your outcomes reports for Lyra and Accolade because you know that the claims you are making are completely unsupportable by the data.
I understand you get paid a lot of money to “show savings,” but surely after you get caught, you should fess up? 
You have 24 hours to fess up, defend your findings and claim the $3MM reward (a defense without claiming the reward is an admission that you know your defense itself is made up) or point out an error that I made. 
 
Al
PS. Honestly if I were in your position, I’d ignore me too.  Because of the rabbit hole my intellectually and ethically challenged critics fall into, and to prevent the “Streisand Effect,” and also to heed Lincoln’s advice that it is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Apparently he did take my advice and ignore me.  The good news is that they can’t sue me* for any alleged errors on my end, having passed on multiple chances to correct me. This is the doctrine of estoppel, which states that you can’t contradict your previous actions or statements with new actions or statements. In lay terms, you can’t murder both your parents and then ask the court for mercy because you’re an orphan.
Also, I’ve decided not to call them “stupid and/or dishonest.” Rather, you can read the writeups on Lyra and Accolade and decide for yourself.
*Speaking of lawsuits, I am available as an expert witness should you decide to sue them.