How Wellness Plans can Reduce your TCOR

Many companies hear all types things about wellness plans and how it can help reduce your health insurance cost.  With health insurance costs on the rise every year I can see how this becomes a topic for health insurance brokers and TPA’s to talk about.  What is seldom talked about is how it can reduce your workers compensation costs.  The ROI (Return on Investment) for workers compensation alone is estimated at 4:1.  When we are looking at ways to cut costs, this certainly seems like an expense that is a no brainer.  When you consider that Obese workers file double the claims of non obese workers and account for 85% of all the cost of workers compensation costs it really starts to make sense. Smokers are absent 50% more and take longer to recover from injuries. 

Here is the double back flip that nobody seems to be talking about:  What about adding all the savings that the health insurance community talks about with the facts that I just told you about workers compensation and looking at the savings at both sides.  If you are under fully insured health and workers compensation plans this could be a huge savings. If you are self insured or insured in a captive the savings could be even more and would start immediately. 

Since Construction, Oil and Gas, Service, and Manufacturing pay much higher workers compensation rates than office workers, they stand to benefit the most from implementing a wellness plan.  If I were a CFO at one of these companies I would jump on this immediately.  Besides the cost savings, fit people perform better, are happier and are less likely to leave.