Looking for a more authentic approach to healthcare?

Looks like wellness is now sexy in the insurance industry. It’s as though insurance companies and brokers have always known and cared for the well-being of their policy holders. 

But, the reality is that health insurance has been at best passive and mostly denying people’s access to preventive measures until forced to change by legislation and public outcry. For years policies specifically restricted wellness care, bypassing far less expensive care with excellent long term results. It is being acknowledged now that up to 80% of dollars spent emanated from lifestyle growing into chronic concerns. So now the carriers are the wellness heroes, but many of the people who sell and service insurance products are still untrained in health, education and economics. They are still selling “products” with the addition of a new “cost item” tacked on conventional health insurance, resulting in a new profit center for their firms.

But, as though a bolt of insight came down from the sky, wellness appears to always have been a part of healthcare including no-cost preventive benefits. Now everyone can have a pedometer, walk 10,000 steps and discounts to purchase weight controlling foods. We now can reward “good” behavior and penalize the “bad.” As long as wellness follows these mechanistic formulas and is dependent on short sighted, short lived results, we will have escalating costs with rampant ill health.