Corporate Wellness Magazine featured Kytle
Frye's article "Employees who Smoke can Cost You: So
How about Doing Something" on July 4, 2014.
Kytle's article addresses the challenges of today's
business environment, with increasing government regulation and
marked uncertainty, wise employers want to do whatever they can to
be in a position to manage their costs and to increase employee
productivity. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, most
employers have had to deal with hefty increases in their health
insurance premiums, and it seems unavoidable that this disturbing
trend will continue, if not accelerate. Faced with that dismal
prospect, employers have begun to think about certain lifestyle
choices of their employees such as obesity and heavy alcohol
consumption and how those choices might actually have a direct
impact on their business. One lifestyle choice with often-huge
adverse effects, not just on the cost of health insurance but also
on the business itself, is smoking and the use of other tobacco
products.
When most people think about the impact of smoking, they tend to
focus on a smoker's potential health issues. There have been
numerous studies focused on smoking and its deleterious effects on
the smoker's productivity as an employee, and the results are
shocking. A recent study involving 20,000 employees revealed that
smokers had more hospital visits per 1,000 than non-smokers (124
vs. 76) had, had a longer average length of stay in the hospital as
compared to non-smokers (6.5 vs. 5 days) and made six more visits
to healthcare facilities per year than non-smokers. Another study
found that smokers missed an average of 6.16 days of work per year
as opposed to the 3.86 days missed by non-smokers and that a smoker
taking four 10-minute smoke breaks actually worked one month less
over the course of a year than did a non-smoking employee.
NBC News recently reported on a massive new study by two economists
on the effects of smoking in the workplace. They examined not just
absenteeism and the impact of smoke breaks, but also the effect of
smoking on an employee's productivity while actually at
work.
Smoking is clearly the kind of lifestyle choice that impacts
healthcare costs and may legitimately affect premium rates, but are
there pitfalls and dangers in imposing additional costs on
smokers?
Click here to read the full article.
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