According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, lots of companies are encouraging workers to get biometric screening. Here’s a picture of that:
But is there evidence that this promotes healthier behavior? Would love someone to direct me to any relevant research.
Recently my employer, Duke University, announced it would be charging $10 more per month to offer health insurance to smokers (see story here). Duke’s policy has a couple motivations. Smokers get sick you see, and those smoking related illnesses cost Duke money. So it’s only fair to pass some of those expenses… (Read the rest and view…
The field of behavioral economics has brought attention to promising ways of motivating people to make better life choices. Many behavioral economic-inspired interventions are relatively hands off — they nudge people to make wiser decisions without in any way restricting their choices. The idea of nudges was made justifiably popular by Cass Sunstein and Dick Thaler…
The food stamp program helps over 40 million Americans pay for groceries. Unlike other forms of economic assistance, this program, called SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), only pays for food, thereby constraining how recipients make use of the aid. But are food stamps constrained enough? SNAP recipients experience higher rates of obesity and diabetes…
Now that the New Year has arrived, it is of course the time for New Year’s resolutions. It’s also the time for columnists to write essays about New Year’s resolutions. One such essay came to my attention recently, because a financial columnist at U.S. News & World Report managed to weave in some research I conducted…
In a recent Health Affairs article, David Asch and I wrote about how hard it can be to stop screening aggressively for things like breast and prostate cancer even when the evidence suggests we are doing more harm than good. Well, journalist Steven Petrow has a nice piece in the Washington Post looking at the…
A recent news article reported that a grocery store in Durham, North Carolina now offers healthy checkout aisles for people interested in minimizing temptation. Ring up your groceries in that aisle, and you won’t be surrounded by candy bars and bags of chips. On the other hand, I’m guessing you will still be surrounded by magazine…