Going the Distance

This woman gets quite enough exercise playing tug-of-war with her conscience, thank you.

By Kathryn Robinson

But here’s what makes those results really compelling. King County’s employee base is so unusually sta-ble—insert crack about bureaucratic deadwood here—that the population as a whole is getting older every year. Yet improbably, they’re submitting fewer costly health claims.

That tells me that for every body lying on the couch—or lying, uh, from the couch—there are considerably more dutifully fulfilling the demands of the program. Call me a cynic…but what is wrong with these people?

I called Dr. Ron Goetzel, the Emory University researcher and nation’s foremost expert on the psychology of these health programs, to find out. At the most basic level are folks learning how to live healthily for the first time. Then there are those who know better and will make healthy choices if they’re surrounded by a supportive community encouraged to make healthy choices, too. (As any member of Weight Watchers or AA will tell you, community is a major part of their success. People whose colleagues go walking at lunch make healthier choices than those whose colleagues waddle down to the greasy spoon.)

And people whose employer not only sanctions those long exercise lunches—but expects them? These folks make the healthiest choices of all. Workplace programs wield subtle psychological heft—particularly ones, like King County’s, that use the carrot of free incentives instead of the stick of punitive charges for unhealthy behavior. “Some employers weigh their employees, screen for smoking, that kind of thing,” Goetzel told me. “But that’s cumbersome and expensive. And based on distrust. Sure, King County could do a health audit on its employees. Instead it’s going out of its way to provide healthy incentives for free. Why would you take advantage of that?”

Gulp.

So the trust that makes the program so easy to cheat is the very thing that makes it such a powerful motivator. Could even be the wave of the future in the health care business—if one can judge by the numbers of private and public employers looking to King County as a model. Which now stands at 200, and counting.

Me, I’m just looking at Ron Sims. Once he got his dismal health assessment he owned up and assumed the stature of a leader who would not ask his team to do a thing he wasn’t himself willing to do. That’s when he launched a full-on fitness regimen, began biking to work, and dropped 50 pounds. I suppose it would be peevish to mention that a few years later he also left King County. Poor guy probably just wanted a doughnut.