Data from California State University Update Knowledge in Health Management (From Financial Risk Management to Promotive Health: A Paradigm Shift in Employer-sponsored Health Insurance?): Health and Medicine – Health Management

Health Policy and Law Daily

2024 MAY 16 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Investigators publish new report on health management. According to news reporting from Los Angeles, California, by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “Health insurance serves to contain financial loss arising from an insured individual’s healthcare costs.”

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from California State University: “We investigate an evolving paradigm shift in employer-sponsored health insurance by which workplace health promotion has increasingly gained coverage. The question for analytical investigation is why and how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) succeeded in integrating health promotion into private health insurance in the United States. Survey data (2008-2020) from the Employer Health Benefits, Annual Survey was disaggregated by insurance attributes and employer characteristics relative to health promotion benefits. Pertinent regulatory policies were content-analysed. The ACA offers a viable policy vehicle for mandating strategic, ex ante coverage of preventive and wellness services, and chronic disease management, nudging insurers to offer related benefits. Such policy is underpinned by insurer and employer incentives, including state-based individual mandates, the medical loss ratio, state-driven workplace initiatives and employee participation rewards.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “While health promotion reduces long-run healthcare costs and risk of disease and improves worker health and productivity, absent carefully devised incentives and rewards, compelling insurers and employers to cover promotive health is unlikely to achieve the objectives and imperatives of healthcare reform. Such policy could even have adverse, albeit unintended, consequences that outweigh their intended outcomes, as insurers may devise ‘backdoor’ strategies once regulatory costs become burdensome.”

For more information on this research see: From Financial Risk Management to Promotive Health: A Paradigm Shift in Employer-sponsored Health Insurance?. Journal of Health Management, 2024. The publisher for Journal of Health Management is SAGE Publications.

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/09720634241245786.

Our news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Roger Lee Mendoza, College of Business and Economics, California State University, Los Angeles, CA, United States.