Let's Hire Healthy Workers

Apparently Walmart managers and other employers are looking for a quick, easy way to cut their health-related costs, according to an online report by the Rochester, N.Y. City News. They're looking for young, healthy employees, and those who are overweight, smoke, or have other high-risk life factors go to the bottom of the prospect list.

Trying to keep worker's comp and health insurance costs down by hiring only health workers is a bad idea. Here's why:

• In the first place, it won't work. In Southwest Idaho we're running at about 2.0 percent unemployment, and when the job market is that open, businesses can't afford to be so selective about their workforce that anyone with a health problem will be turned away
• Another reason it's a bad idea is that costly legal issues, including the whole privacy arena, come into play when employers try to eliminate applicants who may not follow totally healthful lifestyles when they're not at work.
• The most important reason that pre-hire health discrimination shouldn't be considered is that it undermines the concept of shared risk that makes health insurance possible in the first place. Some companies are following the healthy employee model so far that they going the self-insured route, taking people less likely to be sick out of the insurance pool.
  

Recognizing the negative consequences of hiring only "healthy" workers, some businesses are offering cash bonuses and other incentives for losing weight, exercising, eating right, and not using tobacco or alcohol. But will extra cash discriminate unfairly against workers who don't quite make the hit? Do they require managers to be judge, jury, watchman, and awards manager for activities that aren't job related?

Think about it.