Health Care Survey Reveals Interesting Statistics
Hewitt and the National Business Group on Health’s survey reveals five significant insights into how employees and their dependents view health care. These insights are crucial for businesses to understand as they evaluate their current and future health care strategies. Help for prescription drugs is high on the list.
Many employees are not doing what they ought to do to get healthy even though they know better. Most (84%) believe making intelligent decisions in every day life leads to good overall health, and almost three-quarters (72%) believe good health is a outcome of getting regular preventive care. Only 46% of the employees surveyed reported doing a “great” or “good job” of regular exercising and only about half of the workers think they do a “great” or good job” of eating healthy. To help with the high prices of medicines, most workers surveyed ranked prescription program assistance extremely high.
In spite of high satisfaction in health programs, participation remains low. Involvement in many employer provided health programs is not as high as many businesses would like to see, even though employees and their dependents report that they know what they need to do to get and stay healthy. Biometric screenings are the most popular programs with online health information tools and health risk questionnaires following closely. 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.
Financial motivation is a strong factor in participation but non financial, internal motivators can be just as effective. Frequently, businesses assume that providing monetary incentives for participating in programs will increase participation. Nearly half would complete a health-risk questionnaire (HRQ) without any incentive because it is “the right thing to do”. About 30% of the individuals would complete a survey if there was a penalty for not doing so and an additional 30% would do it if there was a financial incentive involved. Further, 44% of workers would participate in a wellness or health improvement program offered by their employer because it is the right thing to do.
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