CoHealth Checkup

Our health is determined by where we live, work, play, and pray. These are our social determinants of health. They have a direct impact on our ability to afford safe housing and pay for healthy food, cover health care services, and access educational and economic opportunities and their benefits. As such, employment as well as the conditions of employment play a key role in determining health.

Our guest for this topic is James S. Marks, MD, MPH. Jim is executive vice president, overseeing all program, communications, research, and policy activities in support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s vision to build a Culture of Health in America. 

When GoodRx first came up on CoHealth's radar in 2012, the company's co-founder, Doug Hirsch, described the mission this way: "We want to mimic companies like Orbitz and create prescription-drug-price transparency so consumers are informed and can afford the medications they need." 

Since then, GoodRx went on to win awards and accolades for its consumer-friendly interface (including CoHealth kudos for helping one of your co-hosts save $40 on a Rx). The company has also grown its services to include a transparent PBM for employers, a GoodRx plaform for physicians, and even a GoodRx search for pet pharmaceuticals.

Join us to find out what's good about GoodRx for you and your employees.

 

 

 

The numbers are grim. No matter what report you look at, the picture of retirement for U.S. workers is not pretty. Let's put it this way: There's no beach and umbrella drink. Instead, there are plans to recover from the Great Recession, plans to continue working, plans to ratchet back one's lifestyle. Join us as we talk with Laurie Rowley, the co-founder and president of The National Association of Retirement Plan Participants (NARPP) to find out how we got here and what employers can do to help their employees be better prepared. 

NARPP is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advocate for individual savers. Using research, partnerships, and innovative educational programs, NARPP is making financial information transparent and universally accessible to the 145 million working Americans saving for retirement. 

Health risk assessments form the backbone of many wellness programs. Their aim? Provide employers with meaningful data for designing and evaluating wellness programs and provide employees with meaningful data for assessing and tackling individual health risk.


The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports in its 2014 Employee Health Benefits Survey that 33% of firms (small and large) offer employees the opportunity to complete an assessment. More than half of these firms offer enticements to boost employees' completion rate, including financial incentives. A much smaller percentage makes completion of an assessment a requirement for benefits enrollment or the lack of participation in a wellness program a penalizable offense when an assessment identifies health risks. 

The questions these assessments ask and their voluntary nature when incentives and penalties are used has raised questions within the EEOC, resulting in a number of suits. 

This show delves into the intent and value of health risk assessments with guest Dr. Peter Mills, co-founder of nGage Health, an organization specifically focused on creating patient engagement and health management solutions for healthcare providers in order to help them address the new challenges brought by health care reform. Peter was a founding team member at global health management consultancy vielife, acquired by CIGNA in 2006. He has also worked extensively with Minneapolis-based RedBrick Health, helping create some of their market-leading health management solutions.

It seems as though all the talk in the human resources and employee benefits world today is about how employers are trying to "get out of the benefits business." The combination of the 2008 recession coupled with the passage of the Affordable Care Act stagnated employee compensation and began to erode employee benefits packages -- all in the name of cutting back on expenses and improving corporate profitability. 

Then, on January 2, 2015, Bobby Fry, one of the owners of Bar Marco, in Pittsburgh, PA, tweeted that the restaurant would stop accepting gratuities from its patrons and, starting in April, move its 20 full-time employees to a $35,000 base salary and provide full health coverage, vacation days and private shares. The Internet exploded with interest. 

About two weeks later, Hartford, CT-based Aetna announced it would raise it's minimum wage to $16/hour -- begining in April 2015. The company will also give approximately 7,000 employees access to health benefits next year that should lower their out-of-pocket costs by up to $4,000.

Economists Jan Zilinsky and Justin Wolfers released a paper coincident with the Aetna annoucement that reviewed the question: Under what circumstances can raising the pay of low-skilled workers at large corporations lead to general improvements in productivity?

Both Jan Zilinsky and Bobby Fry join Carol Harnett this month to discuss the reasoning behind and impact of higher wages and better benefits on the workplace.