The General Good

We do believe that there is a role for the employers as a path to get insurance to people. We talk about single-payer and government programs, but I think there will always be a large government payer, and then there is a role for employers to provide insurance for employees.

Over time, each of you is going to have to become a little savvier about when you get a CAT scan or a shoulder MRI. We’re not talking about being in the back of the ambulance and trying to look at priceline.com for health care. When you can be a rational decision maker (not for emergency situations), that’s when we’re going to see the costs begin to decline.

If we took all of our employees and lined them up on a scale from sickest to healthiest, about two out of 10 employees generate 80 percent of our medical costs. We have about six or so in the center of the group that are at risk. Sixty percent of our employees have one or more health-risk factors that could eventually make them sick or shorten their lives. There’s usually about 20 to 30 percent of people who have no risk factors: they’re exercising, eating right, and getting lots of sleep.

The key then, as an employer who has 60 percent of employees with one or more risk factors . . . We want to slowly move people into a lifestyle that is fully empowered.

Before you start anything in a health program, you should really understand your claims and risks, because if you have a young female population, the way you do your work-site wellness will be very different than if you had an older male population, for example.

We track health-risk assessments and claims. Heart disease and cancer pop up as risk number one and two. There are very good ways now to prevent heart disease. If you look at the state, heart disease is going straight down because of using those strategies: certain medications like Lipitor and aspirin, exercising, and stopping smoking. For cancer, the two controllable risk factors are smoking and obesity. Then we have the chronic diseases like diabetes—it’s just taking off right now. A lot of respiratory diseases are driven by smoking. We’re seeing more and more back, knee, hip pain, and that’s because people are overweight and unfit.

There’s lots of ways to attack these. But today I want to talk about work-site wellness because that’s something you can all do. These are the key things that General Mills focused on and it has to do with our risks:

•We believe our employees should be nonsmokers.
•We want our employees to have a healthy weight.
•We want to reduce our heart risk factors, such as high cholesterol and blood pressure.