Insurance, wellness, and how to pay yoga teachers well

This article is one of an increasing number pointing to ways in which insurance companies are beginning to focus on the benefits of wellness.  The challenge is that company-sponsored wellness programs will be limited in the depth of their impact, because most employees only stay with an organization for a few years, and the benefits of wellness practices may take decades to reveal themselves.

It makes more sense for personal insurance to provide lower fees for those with good wellness habits, just as they do for non-smoking.  The fact that they are not doing so in a large way leads me to suspect that there are legal obstacles to the provision of such wellness-based insurance.  One of the biggest challenges to wellness insurance would be any racial disparities that might show up - if there are wellness practices that are correlated with race, then insurance that rewarded those who participated in wellness practices would penalize those who did not participate in wellness practices.  And if those penalized happened to be disproportionately of one race rather than another, the insurance might be ruled discriminatory and thus illegal.

The best hope around this dilemma is to focus on objective data showing correlations between specific wellness practices and health.  Better yet, it might be necessary to periodically monitor blood sugar, cholesterol, and other objective medical measurements in order to ensure that there existed objective medical evidence that those receiving discounts were indeed less likely to get chronic diseases.  This is similar to Progressive Insurance's voluntary monitoring of driving practices through the installation of a GPS in the driver's car.

More deeply, a change in attitudes around personal health responsibility, personal habits, and our role in diet and exercise would have to be accepted by our legal system.  Unfortunately, the concept of personal responsibility has been steadily eroding in our legal system for nearly 100 years.