What Trump Means for Workplace Wellness

Assume, reasonably, that voters chose Donald Trump to be the next president because they feel big business and government are in bed together. If indeed they are, workplace wellness is their sex toy. There is nothing, certainly in healthcare and possibly anywhere, that more embodies the complete disdain for the average worker than the joined-at-the-hip partnership between big business and government known as workplace wellness. That claim might seem extreme, but put yourself in the shoes of the average worker. You used to have a good health benefit. But then, following the passage of the Affordable Care Act, your benefits were reduced, and you were put in a high-deductible plan. True, your benefits might have been reduced anyway due to the increasing cost of healthcare, but coincidence to the average person smells like causality. See also: The Value of Workplace Wellness   A benefits reduction sounds like a wage cut. However, you are told you can earn some or all of it back. All you have to do is allow your employer (and, yes, it isn’t really your employer, but it smells like your employer) to pry into your personal life with a questionnaire; poke you with needles to do blood tests that over a 15-year period have proved useless at reducing the country’s heart attack and diabetes event rates; and prod you, in violation of all guidelines, to go to the doctor when you aren’t sick. You (remember, “you” are still the worker) are then left with this Hobson’s choice: You must throw yourself at the mercy of an unregulated wellness vendor that – if last month’s C. Everett Koop award to Wellsteps for being the “best wellness program in the country” is any indication – is more likely to harm you than benefit you, while invading your privacy and sucking up your time. As an employee, what recourse do you have? Basically none. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has no provisions against “voluntary” workplace wellness programs, and the word “voluntary” has now been defined to include even programs with non-compliance penalties that might exceed $2,000. The net result: You can be forced to pay a large fine for refusing to participate in a voluntary program, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t sue for malpractice because wellness vendors aren’t clinical professionals, and you can’t complain to the licensing authority because wellness vendors aren’t licensed. You can’t claim they violate the industry code of conduct because – unlike everything else, including war -- wellness has no code of conduct: The wellness trade association has stonewalled on the code of conduct, which embraces only the simple notion that wellness should respect the dignity of workers and not harm them. Should you opt to maintain your dignity and not violate clinical guidelines, by declining to be part of a wellness program, you may lose four figures in compensation just by wanting to be left alone to do your job. Don’t take my word that this is how employees feel. Simply read the comments by employees to any article on wellness. Meanwhile, what is the government doing? Simple. The government is carrying the Business Roundtable’s (BRT) water. The Senate is in the BRT's pocket, holding “hearings” that are basically just ads for the BRT. And the president put the EEOC on a short leash after the BRT threatened him. As members of the BRT, and their like-minded compadres at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporations are gleeful. They can cut benefits and “offer” employees the opportunity to earn them back, or just fine employees directly. One vendor, Bravo Wellness, even dogwhistled to employers that they could get immediate “savings” by fining employees. What happens now, and what should you do? Wellness is likely to become a touchstone for all that is wrong with the Affordable Care Act, because, almost uniquely in the ACA, the wellness provision has basically no upside. (Disagree? Show I’m wrong, and claim the $1 million reward I’ve offered to anyone who can show wellness has broken even this century.) The American Association of Retired People (AARP) is already shining a light on wellness via a lawsuit, and the effort may make it much more difficult for the wellness industry, the BRT and the Chamber to hide behind the EEOC. As representatives of the employers who may very well be abusing employees (and not knowing it, any more than the Boise School District realized it was being snookered by Wellsteps until the problem was exposed by a leading healthcare journalist -- even though the invalidity and ineffectiveness of the district's wellness program was perfectly obvious to Wellsteps’ colleagues on the award committee), you should get ahead of this curve. Drop punitive wellness programs, or programs with low participation (which reflects low satisfaction). Or swap out programs that “do wellness to employees” for programs that “do wellness for employees.” The difference is fairly self-evident. Are employees lining up, or do they need to be coaxed? Are there big bribes or fines involved? Is the program something you yourself would do without an incentive? See also: ‘Surviving Workplace Wellness’: an Excerpt   You shouldn’t need to wait for the law to change to make changes yourself now. “Pry, poke and prod” programs were a bad idea to begin with, and the passage of time and rise of populism hasn’t made them any better. Disclosure The editorial viewpoint in this article, though reflecting my opinion, is colored by my leadership of Quizzify. Quizzify does not “pry, poke and prod” employees, but rather just enhances their knowledge base in an entertaining way. Not just theirs – even yours. Play the sample game on the site and see for yourself. We hope to benefit from the likely retreat from government support for intrusive and ineffective wellness programs in the new administration. On the other hand, you are free to publish opposing comments or viewpoints. Join the conversation, even if it means hollering at me by quoting people who know they are wrong claiming savings they know are fabricated.