Should You Pay Your Employees to Be Healthy?

On a recent BNET post, Jeffrey Pfeffer outlined the ways America's work culture leaves us sicker than we should be. Employers that disregard a reasonable work-life balance end up causing health problems related to stress. Pfeffer argues that healthcare reform starts at the office because "working in America is literally hazardous to your health."
Researchers at Wharton take the argument one step further. Employers shouldn't just focus on ways to prevent sickness. Employers should pay their employees to be healthy.

Kevin Volpp, professor of medicine and health care management at Wharton, and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, along with his colleagues Mark V. Pauly, Wharton professor of health care management and George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University believe that cash incentives from employers or insurance companies, known as "P4P4P" or pay for performance for patients, could be one of the best ways to create a healthier workforce and ultimately drive down the costs of healthcare.

A smoking-cessation study led by Volpp, "Financial Incentives for Smoking Cessation," published in the New England Journal of Medicine and conducted among employees at General Electric, found that 9.4% of smokers who were offered $750 in incentives to quit smoking were able to remain smoke free for 18 months, compared with just 3.6% of smokers who tried to quit without financial incentive. Another Volpp-led study, "Financial Incentives for Weight Loss," published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that dieters who could earn money by loosing weight lost more pounds more quickly than those who weren't offered a monetary reward.

However, even if the costs of healthcare could be reduced under a P4P4P system, do you think it is an employer's right or responsibility to pay its employees to be healthy?

Image by Flickr user "Argonne National Laboratory," CC 2.0.