Incentives
The 1,250 employees of Melton Truck Lines have two types of health insurance. The “iCare” policy requires workers and family members to get checked for blood pressure, waistline, cholesterol, triglycerides and blood sugar. The “I Don’t Care” policy requires no screening. It is 50 percent more expensive.
Jim Landers in the Dallas Morning News.
Sounds simple and to the point!
That is just great! The “I don’t care policy.” Sign me up!!!
Yes, absolutely SIGN ME UP
but, it is 50% more expensive…
It may be that the screening tests in the icare policy aren’t that all effective, but caring enough to get the testing may be a proxy for more caring overall that might affect costs, even if it doesn’t affect health.
Definitely. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
No matter what a family does, the more comprehensive a policy that encourages them to go to all of their doctors regularly (once or twice a year for check ups) they will save so much more in the end. Many many many families (usually poorer families) avoid all medical expenses till it is an emergency or till it is too late. By that point, costs go way up and they end up spending much more than they would have spent on all of those doctor visits combined!
I don’t know if they will always end up saving money in the end, but your point is generally valid.
Generally, Preventative healthcare is more inexpensive. What ends up costing companies the most is the long-term health issues.
I would say that this is a very successfully manipulative policy, and I mean manipulative in the most positive sense.
I find that this type of quazi-extortionary measures is repulsive to me. Let people make their own decisions, we don’t have change their minds.
Truckers should have their unions going to bat for them and getting them much better benefits.
The iCare policy sounds pretty bare bones. However, the preventative care could help some people.
My father was a trucker, and as a group his cohorts had terrible health. Sitting 18 hours a day and sustaining on coffee and cigarettes and truck stop food does not help. Kind of amazing that the employer offers health care at all.
The last paragraph of the news article was striking….. it states that an employee’s spouse had a stroke and spent time in intensive care….and that the employer paid $450,000 in hospital charges.
Did they really pay that much? Or were they billed that much and paid one tenth of that amount?
I have often thought that one reason hospitals send such ludicrous bills is that some fool might pay the total amount. I hope this firm was not the fool.