Health insurance incentive programs

Seems solid, I'd be annoyed to have to go through it all over again every year too!

My family tends to use FSA money toward glasses and root canals :P We're exciting that way.

Not a health care program, but Walgreens links to your tracker and you get reward dollars. I get $15 to spend there every few months and use it to buy vitamins.

I find it interesting, though, that these companies do this. It is so easy to cheat and get steps without walking.

That's nifty that Walgreens does that.

And, yes, it is easy to cheat the system. Although I wonder if newer trackers are less easy to cheat than older ones? My partner who is on this insurance with me has ZERO desire to participate in this for [insert security/privacy reasons here] and some friends suggested that Art have Lance wear his tracker instead because, hey, Lance is a marathoner who gets ALL THE STEPS. :P Not going to happen!

We get charged an extra $15 per prescription if we use walgreens pharmacies since they sell tobacco products. Its aimed at discouraging smoking, I think my job is really overstepping with that one.

Luckily for me CVS is just as convenient.

Wow! That is interesting.

wow - that is ridiculous. No prescription client is going to be tempted by the tobacco products unless they're already smokers. I can't believe your health insurance company would even make such an absurd claim. Yikes!

I'm on my company's wellness committee, and while we don't have a tracker program, we do have an incentive program. If you do a company-provided biometric screening early in the year, you get one day of PTO. If you participate in assorted wellness activities of your choice throughout the year, you get a $100 gift card or another day of PTO in December.

Of 100 people in the company, roughly half participated last year, which is pretty great!

That's cool. I like that companies are being aware of these things and offering incentives - although I hope that these same companies are aware enough to realize that employees who work ridiculous numbers of hours might have trouble getting to doctors or to the gym or whatever. (Art's companies have not always been great at the whole work/life balance thing.)

My mom's company used to have step challenges over the different branches. The branch that won each month's step challenge would get some fun perk. (Probably food related because that's the way things like this seem to go. "Yay, you're healthy! Have a gift card to Olive Garden!")

Now that I have my tracker, I can see what my "goals" are. They're F.I.T. (How clever.)

F(requency) - Take six brief walks over the course of your day, at least an hour apart. (For each walk, you just need 500 steps within 7 minutes.)

I(ntensity) - Take one brisk, airport-paced walk. (3000 steps within 30 minutes, averaging 100 steps/minute)

T(enacity) - Take at least 10,000 steps in a day. (The activity tracker will reset at midnight.)

I get $1 per goal achieved per day. I think, to start, I'm just going to continue life as normal and see what my baseline is according to this tracker.