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Is Optum Alternative-Facting?

February 22, 2017 8:43 am / 2 Comments on Is Optum Alternative-Facting?

Wellness vendors were into alternative facts before alternative facts were cool.  They even expanded the domain to include alternative math, like Wellsteps showing that costs had increased and decreased at the same time.

Is Optum (United Healthcare) going a step further, into alternative ethics?  Here are two Optum claims, which appear to be exactly the opposite of each other.  Now, we aren’t going to call anyone an alternative fact-er, but we would invite them to explain — and we’ll provide equal time — how both these seemingly incompatible statements can be true.

First, the head of their wellness group, Seth Serxner, acknowledged that biometric screening is supposed to be done in accordance with guidelines.  (The guidelines are reproduced below, by the way, since he seems to have trouble remembering them when he’s approving marketing materials.)

He insisted, on tape, that the only reason Optum flouts screening guidelines is because employers make them do it: “Many clients won’t let us [screen appropriately],” he said.  The full tape can be downloaded from that link, but it is tough to find the audio. (The time stamps appear to vary by download. However, it is towards the end and you can manually sync by following The Great Debate in total, which starts here.)

So, on Seth’s planet, Optum begs employers to pay them less money by screening their employees at longer, more appropriate, age-adjusted intervals…and employers refuse.

However, it appears, based on the marketing material below, that the reason employers refuse to let Optum screen appropriately is that Optum requires employers to screen inappropriately.  You read that right: “participation in our wellness program…is a requirement.” And that decidedly includes screening…which employers must pay extra for in order to get the “savings” on their premium.

united-healthcare-lies

They then go on to quote — you guessed it — Kate Baicker’s 7-year-old study based on alternative data that even she appears not to believe any more.  The second alternative quote is attributed to WELCOA, a quote which WELCOA’s CEO, Ryan Picarella, assures me he never made, nor did anyone currently in his organization, and that he doesn’t believe.

Update: It was observed on Linkedin that the reason they do this (for their fully insured business) could be as an ACA play. You don’t mind if spending on claims increases because you need to get to 80% (or 85%, depending on size) loss ratio anyway. The screening isn’t counted towards the 85% because it’s not a claim, so you make money there too by charging separately. Brilliant!  United Healthcare’s shareholders should be very impressed.

Here are the USPSTF guidelines, by the way, also reproduced below, albeit badly.  (There is nothing wrong with your TV set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture.)  This is actually the version published by “Choosing Wisely”  (a joint project of Consumer Reports and the Society of General Internal Medicine), and they don’t totally sync with USPSTF, but whatever the minor differences are, neither looks anything like what Optum and their alternative friends advocate.

choosing-wisely-uspstf-guidelines

 

 

 

 

 

Breaking News: Is Ron Goetzel about to admit wellness loses money?

February 6, 2017 4:31 pm / 3 Comments on Breaking News: Is Ron Goetzel about to admit wellness loses money?

This article is now mooted — the Health Affairs piece did come out…and it’s much much worse (meaning, better) than I thought. Skip to it now.

Rumor has it that within the next couple of days Health Affairs is going to release a paper in which Ron Goetzel admits that — even with his finger on the scale as it always is (along with the other nine and all his toes) — wellness loses money.  This is total vindication for the years in which he has preferred to simply fabricate large savings, based on trivial risk impact, and then accuse me of “outrageous inaccuracies” and other such fanciful tales for observing — accurately, as it turns out — that all his savings are made up.

Yes, I know I’ve said he has admitted wellness loses money several times before, like in his HERO Guidebook, or in STATNews, or in the Chicago Tribune.  But those were all gaffes. (A gaffe is defined as “accidentally telling the truth.”)  The difference is, this time it’s deliberate.

And, no, he hasn’t sworn off lying.  Lying is a thing these days.  He was way ahead of the curve on that. Mind you, I have not seen the article, and I wasn’t allowed to peer review it. (Health Affairs allows authors to rule out certain peer reviewers, so he ruled me out — despite admitting not too long ago that I am the best peer reviewer in the field.)  However, I anticipated that, given his level of integrity, he would use the completely invalid participants-vs-non-participants methodology, and so I invalidated it for him ahead of time, not that he didn’t already know.

Despite admitting losses, he still holds to the fiction that somehow risk factors decline, a claim which I intend to examine once I see the article.  I suspect he didn’t plausibility-test the outcomes (even though his HERO guidebook says to do that) and/or he didn’t count dropouts and non-participants.  But we’ll know soon enough.

However, by admitting wellness loses money even if risk factors improve, he just invalidated every single Koop Award he has ever bestowed on any of his buddies.  The reason is that in those award-winning situations, risk factors either only improve a trifle (Staywell, 2014 and Nebraska, 2012), don’t decline at all (McKesson, 2015), or increase (Wellsteps and Boise, 2016).  None of these non-improvements acknowledges dropouts, of course.

Stay tuned…

PS  Remember my $2-million reward for showing wellness saves money?  Let’s make it $3-million.

 

 

 

 

Stick a fork in it: Participants-vs-non-participants study design is dead

January 26, 2017 9:47 am / 3 Comments on Stick a fork in it: Participants-vs-non-participants study design is dead

If instead of randomized control trials, the FDA simply allowed drug companies to compare the results of people who conscientiously used a drug to people who couldn’t be bothered, they could save a ton of money.

Not that I want to put ideas in their head.

But they don’t allow that, for the simple reason that active motivated people will always outperform inactive unmotivated people. Absent equal intent-to-treat — meaning comparing people actually taking the drug to people who think they are actually taking the drug — you can’t distinguish the effect of motivation from the effect of the drug.

As true as that is in drug research, it is even more true in activities, such as wellness, where motivation is paramount.  And yet the standard study design –participants vs. non-participants — compares all the motivated people to all the unmotivated people.

Sure, the Wellness Ignorati will claim the groups are “matched,” and on paper maybe their demographics are the same…but you can’t “match” the state of mind between participants and non-participants, as the Ignorati well know.

This American Journal of Managed Care essay, a more formal albeit less colorful version of an earlier TSW smackdown, means that quite literally every study done using this participants-vs-non-participants design is either largely or entirely invalid.

 

10 Reasons Employees Hate Wellness Programs

January 12, 2017 2:39 pm / 4 Comments on 10 Reasons Employees Hate Wellness Programs

In keeping with my New Years resolution to be more positive (and not like: “I’m positive that the board of HERO knows they are liars” — which, by the way, I am, and which they are, and which will be the subject of a future posting), I would like to recommend an outstanding posting by Romy Antoine on Linkedin.  No, I didn’t know who he was either…but I do now, and you should too. He exemplifies the next generation of talent in this field.

He lists 10 reasons employees hate “pry, poke and prod” wellness programs. (Just in case you are keeping score at home, zero of those reasons would apply to Quizzify — and that’s not an accident.)  I found myself nodding at every single one.  You may be able to address some of these, but if there is one thing that Ron Goetzel and I agree on besides the sun rising in the east, it’s that wellness is, to use his words from our debate, very very hard to do right, which is why, to use his words again, thousands of programs fail while only 100 succeed.

Oh, and here is a reason employees might not hate your wellness program: according to Employee Benefit News: they don’t know it exists.

80% said their wellness program has had a positive effect on employee health and productivity and 70% said it has had a positive effect on health care costs. However, the data released by the Transamerica Center for Health Studies also showed a significant number of employees did not know their company had a wellness program.

Yes, I know it isn’t always about me (my first wife was quite clear on that point), and, yes, I know it isn’t always about Quizzify, but Quizzify can customize questions to educate your employees on your wellness offerings, so at least they’ll know your program exists. And hopefully they won’t hate it when they do.

2015 Koop Award Winner McKesson Stock Plummets in 2016

December 30, 2016 10:27 am / 2 Comments on 2015 Koop Award Winner McKesson Stock Plummets in 2016

They say being on the cover of Sports Illustrated jinxes you. I wouldn’t know.  There is no chance of that for me, unless they run a feature story about 60-year-olds playing Ultimate Frisbee on Christmas night, when they should be playing canasta with their aunts.

That jinx may be an urban legend, but here’s a real jinx: winning a C. Everett Koop Award.  The 2016 vendor got humiliated in STATNews, of course — we’ve already covered that. The 2012 awardee was embarrassed in the media as well. The vendor ended up losing their gig.

Neither of their customers (Boise or Nebraska) are public companies, though, and that’s what this article is about, because it’s the customer’s performance we are most interested in, not the vendor’s. The latter do quite well for themselves, snookering unsuspecting employers.

The most recent public company to win an award was the 2015 winner, McKesson. McKesson got clobbered in the stock market in 2016, the 14th worst performance among the S&P 500, as investors learned that only the dumbest bunch of managers would pay a cabal of vendors (that themselves are among the industry’s most clueless, like Vitality) to harass their employees. Employee Benefit News took notice of the McKesson wellness program, and pilloried them, thus triggering the sell-off.

You might say: “Wait a minute. Yes, that was a failed, hilariously mismeasured, program whose award was due to the cronyism of having 5 of their vendors and consultants connected with the Awards Committee, but how could something as trivial as a wellness program be responsible for their stock price collapse?”

The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. Based on the amount of money these programs lose, McKesson’s wellness program was probably only responsible for 1% or so of the 27% stock price decline.  And that’s precisely the point. Ron Goetzel claimed that winning a Koop Award caused a dramatic increase in stock prices.  I noted that, like most of Ron’s defenses of wellness, that analysis didn’t hold water, and any observer with a calculator and access to stock price histories could see that wellness causes a dramatic decrease in stock prices.

While I won that face-off (a year later, you would have been way ahead of the game shorting Koop Award stocks and hedging with index and sector funds), neither conclusion is really valid. Both analyses have a ridiculously low signal-to-noise ratio. Many things happen in the market that overwhelm wellness. For instance, I don’t think any of the analyses of Citibank’s 2008 crash would blame their Koop Award-winning wellness program.

Instead, the negative impact on stock valuations can be shown to be pretty trivial.  Let’s start out with some favorable assumptions. Assume the typical program is more successful both than the allegedly successful one most recently measured in Health Affairs and also than the award-winning so-called best-in-the-country Wellsteps program for Boise, in that it neither loses money nor harms employees. Instead, it is only worthless. So even though Ron Goetzel and Michael O’Donnell say most programs fail, let’s assume yours neither causes health spending to increase or employees to get worse.

If you pay vendors to “manage” 10,000 employees @$150, that’s $1.5 million lost. With a typical pretax P/E of 10, you reduce your market value by $15,000,000. A company with 10,000 employees might have (for example) a market value of $1.5-billion. That makes the negative impact of wellness on stock price only 1%, hardly enough to cost a CEO his job.

So the good news is that McKesson’s collapse is the exception. Screening the stuffing out of employees, lying about outcomes, winning a Koop Award, and hiring a cabal of clueless vendors will not cause your stock price to plunge. In a year in which the media gave the wellness industry little reason to cheer, costing your shareholders only 1% of their investment in your company is great news. Worthy of a celebration. Or at least a couple rounds of canasta.

The 2016 Wellness Deplorables Award winner: Wellsteps

December 29, 2016 11:47 am / 4 Comments on The 2016 Wellness Deplorables Award winner: Wellsteps

This completes our year-end series on the Goofuses and Gallants of the wellness industry. See:

goofusgallant

Are you smarter than an award-winning wellness vendor? Take this quiz and find out.

Q: How is the first unlike the second?

aldana-linkedin-profile-checkpopeye

The first, Wellsteps CEO Steve Aldana, claims that it’s bananas that provide magical powers.  And unlike Popeye and spinach, he doesn’t think we need to consume massive quantities. “Even one more bite of a banana” is all it takes to reduce overall costs by fully a third, despite their admission that costs for individual employees increase by about the same amount over the same period.

wellsteps-cost-savingswellsteps cost per person

Yes, you read that right, and, yes, is it mathematically impossible for a number to go up and down at the same time. I noted in Wellsteps Stumbles Onward that Wellsteps had accidentally told the truth on the second display showing increasing costs, thus totally contradicting the first. The second display subsequently disappeared.

Perhaps Wellsteps deliberately made up the first slide to fool people (in this case, the Boise School District).  The more charitable explanation, which shows Wellsteps in a better light, is that they didn’t deliberately lie when they said costs increased and decreased at the same time. Instead, they were simply confused by their own stupidity.

Lying is a Business Strategy

Wellsteps’ Linkedin group is called Wellness is a Business Strategy. I was banned from posting on it, accompanied by the following invocation of the First Amendment:

“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?” [Where “false data” is defined as “any data”]

Sounds like they support free speech…except when they don’t. Speaking of supporting free speech, they claimed in bright red letters — for no apparent reason other than they were probably suffering withdrawal symptoms from having gone a whole week without lying — that they had convinced Linkedin to ban us from posting.  And yet many of you clicked through from linkedin. So here we are, posting.

wellsteps-linkedin

Stupid is a Business Strategy

Wellsteps’ ROI model doesn’t generate an ROI.  It doesn’t even generate a savings projection. What does it “generate”?  One number: $1359.  Yes,  it always gives the same answer ($1359 savings per employee) if you zero out “annual cost increases” in their model to control for inflation. So anyone can see this model simply makes no sense, notwithstanding Wellsteps’ insistence that it is “based on every ROI study ever published.”

How stupid is Wellsteps’ model? Even Ron Goetzel refused to defend it. And when Ron Goetzel won’t defend stupid data fabricated by his friends, you know it’s bad.

groucho-marx

Harming Employees is a Business Strategy

To win the Deplorables Award, outlying and outstupiding other vendors is a dicey strategy due to all the competition trying to do the same thing. So Wellsteps decided to boldly go where no vendor has gone before: they acknowledged, even bragged about, harming employees. Sure, plenty of vendors harm employees–by enticing them into crash-dieting contests, flouting clinical guidelines or giving them worthless nutritional supplements and billing their insurers. But no one had ever documented the before-after harms of wellness as conscientiously as Wellsteps did, which I helpfully displayed in detail.

Insults are a Business Strategy

What the judges here at TSW especially liked about Wellsteps’ candidacy for the Deplorables Award was their track record of not just harms and deceit, but also insults. Very clever ones too.

For instance, Wellsteps’ rebutted my observation that all their data is fabricated by saying I’m full of “hot air.” Touche!

wellsteps troy adams

One would think that that this guy (Mr. Aldana’s crony) could have come up with a better counterargument, given that he claims to have spent “11 years in college.” If you’re keeping score at home, that’s four more years than Bluto Blutarski.

Here are a few more targets of their ripostes:

Such brilliant repartee, in an earlier generation, would have landed them a seat at the Algonquin Roundtable.

Bananas are a Business Strategy

So, congratulations to Wellsteps for winning their first Deplorables Award.  Darwin will take it from here, and maybe get them a new gig more appropriate to their capabilities.

aldana-banana

 

Oops, they did it again. Wellsteps stumbles on integrity one more time.

December 7, 2016 11:22 am / 3 Comments on Oops, they did it again. Wellsteps stumbles on integrity one more time.

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:

wellsteps-linkedin

 

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.

 

 

Wellsteps Arithmetic for Dummies

December 1, 2016 10:43 am / 4 Comments on Wellsteps Arithmetic for Dummies

Those of you with lives may not have noticed all the commotion yesterday. Wellsteps moved their post about our bullying from their own blog to Linkedin.

But then, sort of like Dukakis in his tank, once they did that, they realized that wasn’t such a good idea and took it all down, but it was too late. The problem was that on Linkedin, their rant attracted many comments from the triple-digit IQ crowd. So now, in order to find this post, you have to go to the Wellsteps blog. It is posted under: “Great Ideas from the Experts.”  Among other highlights, they said we were extorting them. Here is the source for that: we  offer $1000 and public apologies if we made a mistake in our writeups, and a $2-million reward for proving wellness breaks even, or that Boise saved money.

To them, and to all members of the Koop Committee that decided this Boise School District outcome was award-worthy, I say, “Find a mistake in my critique and collect the $1000. Or show I’m wrong about my ‘twisted facts’ and claim the reward. Instead of just criticizing me for ‘twisted facts,’ take my money. Sue me. Have me arrested for blackmail and extortion (their words). Anything. Don’t make me beg.”

This isn’t about that — postings on that topic, along with Sharon Begley’s brilliant smackdown in STATNews are easily findable elsewhere.  Instead, all we want to do today is simply add up a column of Wellsteps’ own numbers. That is how Wellsteps defines “bullying” — adding up their own numbers. In this case, it is the improvements and deteriorations, year over year, in the Boise School District’s biometrics.

I’ve already done this once, as a service to Wellsteps, but apparently they had a really bad fifth-grade math teacher. So I’m doing it again — and this time color-coding it, so even the dumbest Wellsteps executives can find someone to explain it to them.

Here is the actual screenshot of the year-over-year biometrics, from their Koop Award application. Once again, these are their figures. They often ask why we don’t publish our own studies.  We don’t have to — their numbers make our case better than we could make our own, with no “he said-she said” about whose numbers are right. So, we’ll admit it!  Their numbers below are facts — they are right!  (I guess graciously conceding that one’s adversary is correct is another form of bullying.)

wellsteps biometrics

We then twisted their columns of facts into totals, below. I can send the Excel sheet on request.

wellsteps-biometrics-spreadsheet

As you can see, the population deteriorated quite a bit–6397 readings got worse while 5293 improved.  Oh, and one other thing: more than 40% of the “improved” values are glucose levels declining, in employees whose glucose was already normal.   Attention, Wellsteps: there is no concept of “improving” normal glucose levels. That would be like “improving” on a 98.6 body temperature.

And who amongst us hasn’t felt draggy during a workday as our glucose falls, and eaten a snack to get our energy and productivity back? Excluding the 2134 glucose “improvements” in people who already had normal glucose, deteriorating biometrics outnumbered improving biometrics by 6397 to 3159. That’s more than 2 to 1!

We’re taking those out to be consistent with the word “normal.” Or, since we are very polite bullies, we could leave them in and stick with 6397 vs. 5293, if Wellsteps chooses.  We are happy to do the latter because we understand that in Wellsteps’ lexicon, words and phrases mean the opposite. In addition to “normal” and “bullying,” that lexicon would include “extortion,” “blackmail,” “twisted facts,” and “great ideas from the experts.”

How to cheat in a corporate weight loss contest (SPOILER ALERT: This gets gross)

November 28, 2016 8:16 am / 14 Comments on How to cheat in a corporate weight loss contest (SPOILER ALERT: This gets gross)

2024 Update: This post, intended as humor for HR/benefits professionals, has now attracted 200,000 views, reaching employees intending to cheat their way to a high BMI. Not so much any more for crash-dieting contests and wellness “challenges,” but rather to qualify for weight loss drugs. Eight years later, it still appears on the first page of a Google search on “how to cheat in a corporate wellness program.”

Attention, employees who want to learn how to cheat in a corporate wellness contest: for the actual cheating hints, skim down to: “How to Cheat in a Crash-Dieting Contest.” The suggestions apply not just to corporate biggest loser contests, but to any corporate weigh-in where money is attached to weight. (This post is actually intended for your company’s HR people who for some reason think encouraging you to binge and then crash-diet is a good idea and don’t realize wellness is an obvious scam.)

Further, the law has changed and you can now sue your employer if they fine you (or give you a high-deductible plan and make you “earn the incentive”) for refusing to participate in biometric screens and other clinical wellness activities. You can contact us for more information.

If we were real journalists here, we’d have killed a lot of trees in the cause of exposing the massive amount of lying and cheating by wellness vendors.  However, as mere bloggers, all we do is kill millions of defenseless electrons.*

And yet we’ve sacrificed nary a single electron to the cause of exposing the massive amount of lying and cheating by the employees themselves.  And massive it is. My very own extended family members are swapping Fitbits around to increase their steps.  Less for the money than for bragging rights about who can game the contest the best.

Indeed, these corporate “challenges” are really mental challenges, not physical ones, to see who can do the best job outsmarting the wellness vendor.  Outsmarting wellness vendors, as past columns have shown, isn’t exactly a heavy lift: we have often observed that the good news about wellness is that NASA employees don’t have to worry about their job security because wellness vendors aren’t exactly rocket scientists.

To that end, the Wall Street Journal wrote an entire article about employees cheating in wellness programs. Apparently, employees are enlisting puppies, hamsters, even power tools and a ceiling fan in their quest to undermine their company’s wellness program. One enterprising employee posted a youtube showing how to cheat on these programs.  A Midwestern cadre of truly dedicated employees took cheating a bit farther than most, and got themselves indicted for defrauding Kansas City out of $300,000 by lying on wellness programs.

There are entire blog posts on how to cheat in a wellness program, and even a gadget available online to help you do exactly that.

30-second shameless plug time

Of course, there is one surefire way to avoid the downside of cheating: design cheating into the program. And that’s exactly what Quizzify does.  The way to cheat on Quizzify is to look up the answers and learn about health literacy — which is exactly what we want employees to do!

How to cheat in a crash-dieting contest

Employees especially like to cheat in crash-dieting contests, enough so that countermeasures are needed. For instance, a vendor named Healthywage is bragging about how it ferrets out “fraudulent participants.”  I figured I’d see what the internet has to offer on corporate biggest loser program cheating, because, after all, these days almost every search generates tons of hits.  I say “almost” because if you search on “honest wellness vendors” and “Wellsteps,” there is only one hit: my observation that the latter could never be confused with the former.

In particular, the search found a group called www.healthstatus.com, which has given this topic altogether too much thought, thankfully. In all fairness to the HealthStatus folks (who do seem very well-intentioned and on the level), before they list their recommendations, they provide a cigarette-type warning label, as these programs richly deserve:

It’s getting to be New Year’s resolution time and many companies will try and “encourage” weight loss with a “Biggest Loser” type contest.  Frankly, this is really a bad idea, as it can create all kinds of bad habits and damaging activities by the participants, as they starve, dehydrate and supplement themselves in an effort to win.

Having gotten the grownup stuff out of the way, here are their “recommendations” for employees whose employers, like Schlumberger, somehow got the impression these contests are a good idea, perhaps because their mothers didn’t listen to enough Mozart when they were in the womb. A few recommendations are fairly harmless, like drink a lot of water starting 3 days early and don’t pee (or do number twosies) before your weigh-in. And, of course, wear heavy clothes, carry lots of change in your pockets etc.  You know, your typical garden-variety dishonesty that is probably woven into the culture of any employer that sponsors these contests.  (These employers think they are “creating a culture of wellness” when in reality they are creating a culture of deceit.)

By contrast, some of these other recommendations boggle our minds, and, having written exposes on the wellness industry for two years now, our minds are not easily boggled:

The day before the weigh-in, ideally about 17 hours or less before your weigh-in time, you want to get yourself a good salty snack.  A bag of chips, you know the ones that if you eat too many your lips hurt from all the salt and a nice tray of cheese and crackers.

For your dinner meal you want to load up on the  proteins and a big glass of whole milk, also, this is a day you want to skip the fiber.  This is one day of eating like this, we don’t encourage it, but a binge day also sets up your metabolism to know that is not starving, and can help in when we start burning fat after the weigh-in.

The day of the weigh-in, minimize your activity, another big glass of  whole milk with your breakfast that contains some salty options will help you retain more water.

“At this point,” they observe, “you should be a big bloated sloshing mess that needs to go to the bathroom really bad. This is the perfect time to get weighed and measured.” They also remind you to accentuate poor posture, since the long-since discredited Body Mass Index measure still preferred by most of these vendors is a height/weight ratio. (HealthStatus also offers hints for contests that use waist circumference.)

In other words, do all the wrong things — eat badly, slouch, and don’t exercise.  Be as unhealthy as possible.  So you’re already obsessing with your weight and abusing your body horrendously in the name of wellness…and the contest hasn’t even started yet!

I hate to leave everyone hanging but HealthStatus hasn’t published the rest of its recommendations yet, meaning advice on how to cheat during the contests themselves.

And a good thing because I don’t know how much more wellness a fellow can take.

Since self-abuse is actually a very serious topic, I would like to step out of character here and offer a few serious notes.  First, no wonder Optum and HERO and other Wellness Ignorati are stonewalling the Employee Health Program Code of Conduct. Nothing violates it more than their cherished corporate crash-dieting contests.  And a particular call-out of the biggest-loser worst offenders: Virgin Pulse (nee ShapeUp), Wellness Corporate Solutions and HealthyWages.  You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, even relative to other wellness vendors like Wellsteps, which had just recently established a new plateau for harming employees, that you people are blasting right through.

*Just for the record, we know that writing blogs does not kill or even injure electrons. And while Keas might find that being used in blog posts stresses them out, we would disagree.  Quite the opposite: if they enroll in wellness programs, they can live to be 100.

Ever wonder what it’s like to actually participate in a wellness program?

November 18, 2016 8:10 am / 4 Comments on Ever wonder what it’s like to actually participate in a wellness program?

Do you know anyone who is actually in a “pry, poke and prod” wellness program run by one of the 50 vendors “profiled” on this site?  If so, try asking them what they think…and then compare those opinions to what the vendors want them to think. A few tidbits of the latter are listed below:

But none of these vendors ever ask the flesh-and-blood employees how they feel. Turns out there’s an excellent reason for that: employees hate “pry, poke and prod” programs. Here are four sets of vignettes to that effect.

  1. Last month, we collected some comments from an article in Slate about wellness. Just when we thought the news cycle on that article had run, more employees weighed in.  Still, those are just comments, not in-depth experiences.
  2. Getting into the belly of the beast, Vik Khanna posted a ten-part series on the Provant program he and his wife were forced to submit to subject to a major forfeiture. This program sucked up 6 hours of his time and provided tidbits like “drink 8 glasses of water a day,” which of course is a total myth . This myth dates from a misinterpreted finding from 1945. It is now perpetuated only by some wellness vendors (not all of them — incredibly a few have now procured internet connections), as well as presumably Poland Spring, Aquafina, Dasani, Kohler and American Standard.  Obviously if the human race were that dehydrated we would have gone extinct long ago.   Provant water
  3. In addition to Vik’s regular journal entries, every now and then, someone writes in detailing their own experience in being forced to submit to one of these programs. Here is one of our favorites, someone complaining about Optum’s program. No wonder Optum is so opposed to the Employee Health Code of Conduct. I’d be opposed too, if I offered Optum’s program.
  4. Finally, here is the program du jour.  In their alleged attempts to create a culture of health, these vendors are creating cultures of resentment, distrust, and deceit.  We’re copying-and-pasting the opening paragraphs of this rant, but would encourage you to click through to the whole thing.

News Flash, The Dodo Bird is Still Alive

Well another year has rolled around and I was talking to the person who’s experience with their wellness program I had discussed below. Lo and behold, the problems I had originally documented continue unabated. This is a common example, and explains why so many wellness programs should be discontinued.

It was time for next years enrollment period for her insurance and she needed to get a number of points, schedule a coaching visit and get her biometrics and lab work completed to qualify for the premium differential.

The lab work requirement upset her as she had just gotten all the lab work done by her PCP the month earlier, but no, those lab results couldn’t be used. So the vendor repeated all the lab work her PCP had done and more, most of which were absolutely unnecessary based upon USPSTF guidelines. But hey let’s go ahead and waste some money and do a few unnecessary tests.  That’s become the norm for many a wellness program.

The story continues here.

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