How employee health habits cost you money

As an employer you know that your employees' bad health habits can cost you money. This money that it is costing is affecting your company's bottom line. Here is a look at how smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise affect your company's bottom line.

Smoking:

• Smokers miss more work than non-smokers do because of illnesses. A recent study has found that smokers miss an average of 6.16 days of work per year compared to non-smokers who only miss about 3.86 days a year. But this doesn't include the time they need to take off to care for sick children; other studies have found that children of smokers get sick more often than children of non-smokers because of the exposure to second hand smoke.


• Employers who take 4 ten minute smoking breaks a day actually work one month less per year than workers who don't take any smoking breaks


• Smokers have 15% higher disability rates


• Smokers are 50% more likely to be hospitalized for major illnesses


• Non-smoking employees cost the company about $462 less in health care costs than smoking employees


• Non-smokers save the company $284 a year of sick pay


• Life insurance is higher for smoking employees, $425 for a non-smoker compared to $935 for a smoker


• Smokers cost more in insurance claims, on average a heavy smoker costs $70 on each insurance claim compared to a non-smoker who only costs about $61 per claim


• Hospital inpatient costs for smokers is around $700 per stay compared to a non-smoker who usually only has about $575 in costs


• For every employee who quits smoking your company will save $1,382 per year because the cost of tobacco use per employee each year is $1,429 and it will only cost you $45 a year to provide each smoking employee with a stop smoking program.

Obesity and lack of exercise:

• In 2003 according to a study that was done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention medical costs associated with just obesity alone totaled about $75 billion and to top it off taxpayers are paying about half of those costs because of the government funded programs of Medicare and Medicaid


• A 2005 study has found that obesity and lack of physical activity cost employers about $11 billion in lost productivity


• The same study also found that $10.2 billion was spent on direct and indirect medical care for those same employees


• And in this study it was found that $338 million was spent on workers' compensation claims for those employees


• Another study that was done in 2005 showed that if only 5 to 10% of overweight people in California became leaner and more physically active the state of California could see an actual savings of $1 billion per year because of decreased health care costs and increased employee productivity


• Because of your employees lack of productivity and higher health care costs companies actually increase the prices of their products to help pay for these expenses, which all that does is pass along the expense to the consumers. In fact it has been shown in a 2005 study that was done By David Chenoweth that $1,500 of the sticker price for most cars made in the United States actually goes toward health insurance benefits for the union employees who make the cars.


• A study was done that found that overweight workers costs their employers more in injury claims because they have twice the rate of worker's compensation claims than thinner more fit co-worker's


• Obese workers, which are workers who have a body mass index of 40 or higher actually have the highest amount of claims.

Just remember that by getting your employees to make better health choices you can improve their health, which in turn is going to lower health care costs for your company.