Workers’ extra pounds are costing their employers both in medical costs and in lost workdays, a new study shows, from about $175 a year for an overweight man (say, 5 feet 8 inches tall and 180 pounds) to as much as $2,485 for an obese woman (say, 5-foot-4 and 200 pounds).
The study, published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Health Promotion, builds on a growing body of research documenting the high cost of rising obesity problems nationwide.
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Last month, the Trust for America’s Health, using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, reported that 23.2 percent of American adults were obese as of last year, and another 36.2 percent were overweight; in 10 states, more than one-quarter of adults were obese.
Another recent report, in the journal Obesity Research, estimated that adult obesity costs the nation at least $75 billion in medical expenditures, and Rhode Island, about $305 million, about 60 percent of it financed by Medicaid and Medicare.
This new study, however, focuses on the impact of obesity on employers in particular, for whom “an increasingly obese work force and corresponding increases in the cost of health care present a significant obstacle to providing affordable health insurance to employees.”
Moreover, the study notes, obese employees are absent from work more often than their normal-weight colleagues – up to 2.7 extra days per year for obese men and 5.1 for women.
Some of the costs may be passed on to workers in the form of lower wages and/or higher insurance premiums, the authors wrote, but employers will bear at least some of the burden, with the biggest impact felt by companies with older and more female work forces.
The bottom line: Many employers have a big financial stake in helping their workers trim down, and they may want to invest in worksite wellness programs, disease management for obesity, and even increased coverage for interventions such as bariatric surgery.
Ideally, companies will want to start by getting data on the portion of their health costs associated with overweight issues and obesity, the authors wrote. However, such is the rising prevalence of obesity and the resulting cost hike that employers may want to move forward “even in the absence of a full accounting of potential costs and benefits.”
Obesity is defined as a body mass index of 30.0 or higher – 174 pounds at 5-foot-4, for example, or 197 pounds at 5-foot-8. The CDC has linked it to a wide range of major health risks, including Type II diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cholesterol, gallbladder disease, orthopedic, sleep and respiratory problems, and some cancers.
The new study, conducted by RTI International Health, Social and Economics Research in collaboration with a CDC researcher, used data from two major national surveys – the relevant samples were 25,427 and 20,329 adults, respectively – to link self-reported body weight information to absenteeism and to health care cost data gathered from providers.
The researchers broke down the figures by gender and by severity, separating the merely overweight from three grades of obese.
The most severe, with body mass indices of 40.0 or higher, or 232 pounds for a 5-foot-4 woman, only make up 3 percent of the work force, but account for 21 percent of obesity-related costs, the study found. Yet the incidence of serious obesity is rising, the authors wrote, suggesting that the resulting costs will also continue to rise.
And even lower-level weight problems are costly. A simply overweight woman costs her employer an extra $588 per year, the researchers estimated: $495 in health costs and $93 in lost work time. The overweight and obese are also in the majority at many workplaces: 70 percent of full-time working males and 53 percent of females (23 percent of each gender are obese).
Not counting the overweight, the study estimates, obesity costs a typical company with 1,000 workers $285,000 each year, about 30 percent of it in absenteeism. That doesn’t include disability costs and reduced productivity, so the calculations “likely under-report the actual costs of obesity among full-time employees.”
Area employers are catching on. In a recent speech to the Rhode Island Business Group on Health, Hasbro President and CEO Alfred J. Verrechia suggested that employers might want to consider “some consequences” for workers who willingly neglect their own health.
And to help workers be healthier, many employers, including Hasbro, Toray Plastics, Newport Hospital, and some state agencies, have set up educational and fitness programs.
The state’s two major health insurers, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island and UnitedHealthcare of New England, are increasingly promoting such programs to their subscribers, to the point that Blue Cross is setting up a for-profit Wellness Institute subsidiary to provide outsourced services to employers.
United spokeswoman Debora M. Spano noted that compared with other states, Rhode Island still has a relatively low obesity rate – the Trust for America’s Health put it at 19 percent for last year, the third-lowest in the nation (Massachusetts, at 18.4 percent, ranked second, after Colorado). Still, Spano said, “We certainly recognize that it’s an issue, and it affects the health of your heart, most of your organs, and your lifespan.”
Moreover, even in Rhode Island, obesity is also rising rapidly, as the R.I. Department of Health has noted: from 10 percent in 1991, to 13 percent in 1995, to 18 percent in 2003.
An abstract of the American Journal of Health Promotion study is available at healthpromotionjournal.com. The state Department of Health’s latest report on the issue, released in May, is available at www.health.ri.gov/disease/ihw/.
