Health and wellness

The gloves are coming off: employers are getting ready to dish some tough love about wellness, to convince workers that their very lives as well as the existence of company-sponsored benefits are on the line.

There’s no disputing the success of NBC’s “The Biggest Loser”: huge ratings, successful DVD sales and the fact that Jillian Michaels and Bill Germanakos now are household names.

Although many tea-leaf readers predicted that health care reform would spur employers to drop health benefits, a new poll of nearly 3,700 executives by Crain Communications shows such forecasts may have been based more on fear than fact.

Rising health care costs are driving more employers to take up the “sticks painted orange” approach to wellness, with 47% saying they either already use or plan to use financial penalties over the next three to five years for employees who do not participate in certain health improvement programs, according to new Hewitt numbers.

We have another podcast post today, this time with Heather Gatley, executive vice president of HR Services and general counsel for AlphaStaff.

So, we’ve had some time to start to digest the biggest components of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, when they go into effect and the implications for your health plans.

So, I promised that we’d get back to analyzing health care reform, and I am a woman of my word. We’re going to do things a little different today, though, and make today’s post a listen instead of a read.

Forgive me, pros. I’m a little bleary-eyed today, since I stayed up until after midnight to get the official vote tally (219-210, by the way) and real-time analysis of Sunday’s House vote on health care reform.

Short post today, because I’m working full-steam ahead to bring you a whiz-bang April EBN. (Small trade pub trade secret: We work as many as 12 weeks in advance of publication. So send me your ideas now for EBN May!)

Americans work longer hours than people in most other developed countries, including renowned workaholics in Japan. As a result, work-family conflict is much higher in the United States than in other nations.

From booking flights to buying flowers, tax filing tips to TV favorites – there’s an app for that. Smartphone technology is quickly reaching a tipping point, now that users can get tunes, TV and text messages (simultaneously) on their cellphones.

What a difference one special election makes. In the wake of Scott Brown’s upset victory in Tuesday's special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy, all the stories about health care reform this morning involve needles — and not the hypodermic kind.

Panicking about the impact of health care reform legislation? Chances are, your benefit consulting firm has already developed a proprietary tool for this very occasion.

With compromise in the air on Capitol Hill during the holiday season, the stage is set for health care reform legislation passing the House and Senate before boardrooms across Corporate America wrestle with any unintended consequences.

I’ve long maintained that President Obama’s statement on health care reform that “If you like your coverage and your doctor, you can keep it,” was naïve at best and an outright lie at worst.

Yes, according to The Fund for Personal Liberty. The organization is backing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of mandatory Medicare enrollment, and says it will do the same against a national individual mandate, should such a directive be a result of health care reform legislation.