Cardinal Health Honored With Best Employers for Healthy Lifestyles Award by National Business Group on Health

DUBLIN, Ohio, July 2, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Business Group on Health honored Cardinal Health with its Best Employers for Healthy Lifestyles Award for its commitment to promoting a healthy workplace and encouraging employees and their families to support and maintain healthy lifestyles.

Cardinal Health received a platinum award for its Healthy Lifestyles program, a program that is part of the company's overarching benefits strategy to support the well-being and development of its employees. The platinum awards recognizes employers for established "healthy weight, healthy lifestyles" programs with measurable success and documented outcomes.

"Our programs are focused on providing our employees with tools and resources and engaging them to lead a healthy life," said Carole Watkins, Chief Human Resources Officer at Cardinal Health. "We're honored to be recognized by the National Business Group on Health for the success we've achieved with our progressive work in our Healthy Lifestyles initiative."

The company's innovative approach to employee health incorporates work/life effectiveness initiatives, programs and incentives emphasizing wellness and prevention. The programs include consumer-driven health plans, education and awareness programs, disease management and wellness programs, enhanced work/life programs, flexible work pilot programs, financial savings plans and employee assistance programs.

The Healthy Lifestyles program works to promote employees' well-being by maintaining health through work/life effectiveness resources, self-check guides, web-based tools, screenings and preventive care; improving health and reducing risk through biometric screenings, health assessments and coaching; and managing health and chronic conditions through condition management, wellness programs, and nurse advocates.

"We are very pleased to recognize Cardinal Health for its ongoing commitment to providing lifestyle improvement programs that encourage healthy lifestyles for their employees," said Helen Darling, president and CEO of the National Business Group on Health. "Cardinal Health and its management team should be proud of their dedication and recognizing the importance of promoting and maintaining a healthy workforce. We congratulate them on receiving this award."

Cardinal Health received the 2012 Best Employers for Health Lifestyles Award at the Leadership Summit sponsored by the National Business Group on Health's Institute on Innovation in Workforce Well-being. This marks the second time the company has received the award. Cardinal Health had previously been awarded the Best Employers for Health Lifestyles Award at the gold and silver levels.

About Cardinal Health

Headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, Cardinal Health, Inc. (CAH) is a $103 billion health care services company that improves the cost-effectiveness of health care. As the business behind health care, Cardinal Health helps pharmacies, hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers and physician offices focus on patient care while  reducing costs, enhancing efficiency and improving quality. Cardinal Health is an essential link in the health care supply chain, providing pharmaceuticals and medical products to more than 60,000 locations each day. The company is also a leading manufacturer of medical and surgical products, including gloves, surgical apparel and fluid management products. In addition, the company supports the growing diagnostic industry by supplying medical products to clinical laboratories and operating the nation's largest network of radiopharmacies that dispense products to aid in the early diagnosis and treatment of disease. Ranked #21 on the Fortune 500, Cardinal Health employs more than 30,000 people worldwide. More information about the company may be found at cardinalhealth.com and @CardinalHealth on Twitter.

About the National Business Group on Health

The National Business Group on Health is the nation's only non-profit, membership organization of large employers devoted exclusively to finding innovative and forward-thinking solutions to their most important health care and related benefits issues and to being the voice for large employers on national health care issues. The Business Group, whose 345 members include 64 of the Fortune 100, identifies, develops and shares best practices in health benefits, disability, health and productivity, related paid time off and work/life balance issues. Business Group members provide health coverage for more than 55 million U.S. workers, retirees and their families. For more information, visit www.businessgrouphealth.org.

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Health Care Market Analysis Finds Pittsburgh Uses Substantially More Services, Resulting in Higher Costs to Employers

PITTSBURGH, March 26, 2012  /PRNewswire/ -- To provide its members with a baseline understanding of health care delivery and costs in the Pittsburgh region, the non-profit Pittsburgh Business Group on Health (PBGH), an employer-led coalition, commissioned a health care market analysis that found the Pittsburgh region uses substantially more health care services, than comparative markets — Cleveland, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. As analyzed, the Pittsburgh region's annual burden for additional hospitalizations was $187 million.

The Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute (HCI3), a non-profit organization focused on improving health care quality and value through evidence-based incentive and provider payment solutions, worked with PBGH to analyze the market comparison to better understand the relationship between the supply of hospital beds and the frequency of hospitalizations in the four comparable U.S. metropolitan areas. The findings and recommendations were released today in an HCI3 Issue Brief. The initial research was conducted by FORTE Information Resources.

"Due to the uncertainty of the changing landscape of health care, nationally and in the Pittsburgh region, and the potential impact this may have on employers' benefits programs, it was critical to develop a baseline understanding of the delivery and cost of health care in our market," said M. Christine Whipple, PBGH executive director. "It was equally important to determine if the cost and use of health care services is different, and if so, examine how and why. We found that the higher use of services in the Pittsburgh region is producing higher costs for health care. However, without knowing the actual payments to providers for health care services (and the link to the information), it is unclear just how much more employers, and their employees, are paying for health care in our region."

Cheryl Melinchak, PBGH board president and director, Benefits, Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC, indicated, "These studies raise thought-provoking questions about health care in the Pittsburgh region. Based on this type of information, and the current climate, employers have the best opportunity in years to influence the payments and delivery of health care services in our region."

Results
Both Cleveland and Pittsburgh have a higher number of beds per 1,000 residents than are found in Cincinnati or St. Louis. Among these communities, Cincinnati has the fewest hospitals, yet its occupancy rate is among the lowest despite having one of the highest Medicare patient case mix severity adjustments. Adjusted length of stay is second only to that of Pittsburgh.

"Whether one compares U.S. regions or the care major academic medical centers provide — a large fraction of the nearly two-fold differences in per-patient costs that are observed, after accounting for patient case-mix, are due to differences in utilization rates of supply sensitive services," said Elliott S. Fisher, MD, MPH, professor of Medicine at the Dartmouth Medical School and director, Population Health and Policy at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. "Patients cared for in regions that have a greater relative supply of beds and physicians spend more time in the hospital, have more frequent physician visits (especially by specialists), and get more diagnostic tests and imaging services."

Francois de Brantes, HCI3 executive director noted, "By making data available on the costs and quality of care, we can better identify where employers, insurers and providers can collaborate to improve health care in Pittsburgh. Two such areas are payment reform and the use of value-based purchasing and benefit designs. Employers should demand from their health plans new payment models that impose financial risk on providers for excessive and unwarranted use of services. Additionally, Pittsburgh's employers would benefit by being more aggressive in incenting employees to use low cost, high-value providers. Benefit designs can provide the practical way to drive employees to use higher value hospitals that can result in providers moderating their price increases."

Study methodology
Two separate analyses were conducted to measure total hospital capacity in each community and the contribution of that capacity to health care costs. First, PBGH commissioned FORTE to develop the Pittsburgh Health Care Market Comparison, which provides a market assessment of demographic and general health care characteristics, hospital utilization and discharge analyses of specific diagnoses and procedures in each of the four regions. Secondly, HCI3 standardized the community-wide information and using its internal benchmark data of commercially insured health plan members estimated the average national cost of a bed day. This estimate was used to compare the potential added cost of hospital usage on total health care costs in Pittsburgh against that of the other markets.

About the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute™, Inc.
The Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute, Inc. (HCI3) is a non-profit multi-stakeholder umbrella organization for Bridges to Excellence® and PROMETHEUS Payment®. The mission of the organization is to create significant improvements in the quality and affordability of health care by developing and implementing programs that recognize and reward physicians, hospitals and other health care providers that deliver safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and patient-centered care. HCI3 offers a comprehensive package of solutions to employers, health plans and coalitions to improve the flawed incentives that currently permeate the U.S. health care system. www.HCI3.org

About the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health
Founded in 1981, the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health (PBGH) is an employer-led coalition representing over 80 members regional and national members. The coalition, promoting education, collaboration, and innovation to manage costs and drive value in health care and benefits, raises awareness and highlights leading edge strategies through its community forums, members' only meetings, annual conferences and health care market analyses and benchmarking surveys. www.pbghpa.com.

NOTE TO EDITORS: The PBGH Pittsburgh Health Care Market Comparison available to accredited media upon request.

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Could employers dumping health insurance coverage decrease the deficit?

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In the debate over health reform, there’s a lot of crystal ball-gazing over whether employees will continue to offer health insurance, or send their employees to the new health insurance marketplaces where many could purchase subsidized coverage. One concern is that if lots of employers do this, the health reform law’s price tag would skyrocket as more Americans have the federal government footing part of their insurance bill.

Avik Roy notices something interesting in a new CBO report out today, which comes to a different conclusion: Employer-dumping into the exchange could actually reduce the deficit, rather than increase it. That scenario would only play out, however, if employers compensated for dropped coverage by upping their employees’ salaries.

You can see this in this chart, under the Scenario 3, where the CBO modeled a high level of employer dumping:

If employers drop14 million, currently-insured workers into the exchange, the CBO projects that the federal deficit would actually decrease by $13 billion, since those workers could no longer use the current tax deduction for employer-sponsored insurance. Here’s how the CBO explains it:

In this scenario, those extra costs would be almost entirely offset by higher tax revenues stemming from an increase in taxable wages and salaries that would occur as firms reduced their nontaxed payments for employment-based health insurance. That increase in revenues would amount to $351 billion. In addition, revenues from penalties collected from uninsured individuals and especially employers who do not provide minimum health benefits would be higher in this scenario than in the baseline.

The government would have to spend $372 billion for workers who received their coverage through the exchanges, Medicaid and CHIP. But it would also net more in revenue, from newly-taxable income from fees imposed on employers who drop coverage (generally $2,000 per employee). Do the math, and the federal government ends up with $13 billion in deficit reduction.

There is, however, one big caveat to this analysis: It assumes that when employers drop coverage, the money previously spent on insurance will get tacked onto a worker’s paycheck. “So, for example, if your boss is paying you $50,000 a year, and spending $20,000 a year on your health insurance, under the ACA, he’ll drop your health coverage and give you $70,000 in wages,” writes Roy.

If employers cut coverage without a corresponding pay bump, the government wouldn’t see the increase in tax revenue—and that could leave the government in the red.

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Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.

Suzy Khimm covers the budget, economic policy, and financial regulatory reform. Before coming to Washington, she was based in Brazil and Southeast Asia, where she wrote for the Economist, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal Asia. Follow her on Twitter here, and email her here.

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