Health Care Survey Reveals Interesting Stats
How workers view health care is looked out in a new survey conducted by the National Business Group and Hewitt. In order to prepare their corporate health care plans, it is essential to understand the results of the survey. Help for prescription medicines is high on the list.
Many workers are not doing what they ought to do to get healthy even though they know better. Seventy two percent of the employees surveyed think that receiving regular preventive care will result in good health. An additional 84% think that making good decisions in their daily life will lead to overall good health. Only half of the workers think they do a great or good job of eating healthy, while less than half (46%) reported doing a great or good job of exercising on a regular basis. To help with the high cost of prescription medicine, most workers surveyed rated prescription program assistance extremely high.
In spite of high satisfaction in health programs, participation remains low. Involvement in a lot of employer provided health programs is not as high as many employers would like to see, even though employees and their dependents report that they know what they need to do to get and stay healthy. The most popular programs include biometric screenings (61%), followed by online health information tools (53%) and health risk questionnaires (41%). Stress management programs and employee assistance programs (EAPs) were the least popular, with just nine percent participation in each. For employees that have dependent coverage, a prescription program was the number one satisfying benefit.
Internal motivators can be just as effective as financial ones. Frequently, businesses assume that providing financial incentives for participating in programs will increase participation. Citing that it is “the right thing to do”, close to half of all workers surveyed would complete a health risk questionnaire Twenty-nine percent would participate in a HRQ for an incentive and almost the same number would complete it if there was a penalty. Further, 44% of employees would participate in a wellness or health improvement program offered by their employer because it is the right thing to do.