"Wellness" programs just one more way for the bosses to steal your pay

At my job, Humana health insurance - which as a corporation is just slightly less evil than Microsoft and way more evil than BP - runs our lives.

You literally cannot purchase affordable health insurance unless you quit smoking, quit drinking, quit eating like a normal human being and quit driving half a mile over the speed limit.

I am not exaggerating. To receive health care coverage from Humana, you must complete a "Vitality Assessment" including questions that are nobody's fucking business, including a physician's.

Just what "wellness" objective is served by minimum-wage teenaged dropouts giggling over the answers to questions like "How often do you feel life is not worth living?"  Again, I am not kidding.

The only exercise for which Humana gives you credit is exercise recorded by specific devices sold by - surprise! - Humana. Buy hey, what single mother of three making minimum wage doesn't have $50 lying around to buy the official pedometer her job now requires.

Humana even forces you to buy food from Walmart - food that is poisoned by pesticides in third-world hellholes - and refuses to give you credit for buying genuinely healthy food from local farmers' markets.

This is not Obamacare.  This is not the Affordable Care Act. This is motherfucking corporate assholes like Humana taking advantage of the confusion over the ACA to force workers into an Orwellian dystopia of privacy denial.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Not at all surprising that employee wellness program shifts responsibility for unhealthy workplaces off of the employer and onto the employee:

“Many of the individual behaviors you are focusing on in your health and wellness programs [such as] stop smoking, eat better, exercise more, are in fact the consequences of the environments in which they [employees] are working,” Pfeffer says. “If you work people to death, of course they are going to smoke more, drink more and eat worse.”

Pfeffer outlined his concept of “social sustainability,” where companies invest more in making their human capital sustainable.

“Work organizations ought to be measuring the health of their workforce,” he said in his keynote speech. “Just as many places today measure carbon, renewables and environmental impacts, we ought to measure human sustainability just as much as we measure environmental sustainability.”

When determining well-being and longevity of workforces, Pfeffer said that most company wellness programs – which conventionally promote individual health and wellness, biometric screenings and smoking and drinking cessation programs – do fall short of really instituting change. Indicators such as work-family conflict, lack of job control, perceived fairness at work, as well as layoffs and economic insecurity, all play a huge role in workforce health, he added.

“The higher you are [in the organizational structure of your company] the more control you have; the lower you are, [the] more flows down hill,” Pfeffer said, while noting that low control over one’s work increases a person’s likelihood of having a cardiovascular event.

That this Stanford researcher told this to a conference of employers means I’m surprised he wasn’t howled down on the spot. If companies can charge workers higher premiums if they don’t live up to their standards of health, even more money stolen from workers!

On October 1 last year, kynect navigators were overwhelmed by Humana-enslaved Kentucky state employees begging to be freed from a "wellness" system that cut short our very lives from stress. The navigators - who do not work for Humana - often choked up themselves when they had to tell us that not only are workers with employer-run health plans not eligible for the ACA, but that even if we were, most of the ACA plans available in Kentucky are run by - you guessed it - Humana.

Well, stressing us to death before we have a chance to retire is one way to solve the pension crisis.

The Wellness Ripoff

Seems state government is not content to deny its employees their legally-mandated raises and keep them in line with constant threats of layoffs.

Now it's started down the road to making the physicially imperfect subsidize health insurance for everybody else.

Proposes a new Wellness Program that would operate on a voluntary basis. Under that program, where each department of personnel is directed to provide a reduction in employee premiums, a contribution to the reimbursement account, a reduction in out-of-pocket expense, a cash award, additional paid leave or any combination thereof if an employee enrolls in and meets the requirements of the wellness program. The Personnel Cabinet is required to propose the incentives for a minimum number of programs, which include smoking cessation, weight loss, diabetes management, and asthma management.

In other words, if you suffer from genetic- or disease-based obesity, diabetes or asthma, you are going to end up paying more - eventually far, FAR more - for your health insurance than your luckier coworkers.

And yes, as research is beginning to reveal, the difference between the obese/chronically ill and the slender/healthy is mostly a matter of luck, genetic and otherwise.

Everybody who thinks the state is actually going to pay cash incentives for "wellness," as opposed to reducing insurance premiums for the genetically lucky, stand on your head.

This bullshit establishes the legal basis for employment discrimination against anyone who is not thin and perfectly fit.

As a Kentucky taxpayer, I am more than willing to subsidize cash incentives for state employees to adopt healthy behavior. I refuse to condone discrimination disguised as "wellness."