Just 2 Minutes of Intense Exercise Every Day Could Extend Lifespan

From StudyFinds: 

The first study included 71,893 adults without cardiovascular disease or cancer. The median participant age was 62.5 years old, and just over half (56%) were female. Study authors measured weekly levels of vigorous activity and the frequency of exercise bouts lasting two minutes or less. This was a long-term study; subjects were tracked for an average of 6.9 years.

Then, associations between volume and frequency of vigorous activity with death (all-cause, heart disease, and cancer) and incidence of heart disease and cancer after excluding events occurring in the first year were analyzed by researchers. Sure enough, as both the volume and frequency of vigorous activity increased, risk of all five considered adverse outcomes declined. ... 

[S]ubjects who didn’t exercise vigorously at all had a four percent risk of dying within five years. That risk was cut in half (2%) with less than 10 minutes of weekly vigorous activity. Death risk fell to one percent with 60 minutes or more.

When compared to two minutes of intense exercise per week, 15 minutes of vigorous exercise was associated with an 18 percent lower death risk and a 15 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease. Meanwhile, 12 minutes was linked to a 17 percent lower risk of cancer.

Generally, the more exercise the better. For example, roughly 53 minutes of physical activity on a weekly basis was associated with a 36% lower risk of death from any cause.

Employers Expect Major Increases to Health Care Costs in 2023

In 2022, most employers’ healthcare costs increased. According to recent industry data, current signs are also pointing to significantly higher healthcare costs in the upcoming year. Employers now face the difficult task of reigning in rising healthcare costs and keeping employee coverage affordable while trying to remain attractive to current and prospective talent despite their shrinking budgets.

 

Many employers are worried about controlling rising healthcare costs and providing employees with affordable and quality care options. This article explores employer expectations regarding health care costs, reasons health care costs are rising and strategies employers are implementing to address increasing costs.

 

Employers Expect Health Care Costs to Increase

 

Reports from industry experts seem to agree that employers expect major increases in healthcare costs in 2023. Data from Willis Towers Watson’s 2022 Best Practices in Healthcare Survey found that U.S. employers’ healthcare costs are projected to increase 6% next year, compared with an average 5% increase experienced in 2022. Early Mercer survey results suggested that U.S. employers expect their healthcare costs per employee to rise 5.6% on average in 2023.

 

Those costs may increase even more if employers fail to take action to curb rising healthcare costs. If employers fail to make any changes—such as expanding telemedicine options and digital healthcare resources—employers believe the costs for their largest healthcare plans will grow by 7%. The International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans reported that employers anticipate a 7.5% median increase in medical plan costs in 2023.

 

An analysis from global professional services firm Aon predicted employer health care costs will increase by 6.5% in 2023, with the average costs per employee reaching $13,800. Based on Aon’s analysis, this prediction is below the current inflation figure reported in the consumer price index, but it’s significantly higher than the increase in healthcare costs employers saw from 2021 to 2022. Additionally, HR and employee benefits consulting firm Buck found employer healthcare costs in 2023 are projected to increase between 5.8% to 6.9% in its 2022 National Healthcare Trend Survey.

 

Why Health Care Costs Are Increasing

 

There are a few reasons health care costs are increasing. While most employers had lower claim costs during the COVID-19 pandemic, medical plan costs are returning to pre-pandemic levels as healthcare utilization rebounds. Utilization has especially increased for employees dealing with severe chronic diseases and late-stage cancer due to missed or delayed care during the pandemic. Additionally, many employees are struggling with long COVID-19. Even those employees who have recovered from COVID are experiencing cardiovascular and neurological diseases, which is causing employer healthcare costs to increase.

 

Inflation is also causing healthcare costs to rise, and it will likely drive up costs moving forward; however, due to the long-term nature of provider contracts, some employers may not immediately feel the cost increases caused by inflation. In addition, the recent trend of consolidation among hospitals, physician practices, and commercial insurers is triggering higher healthcare prices for private insurance. Other factors contributing to increased healthcare costs include new technology, novel prescription drugs, specialty drugs, and catastrophic claims.

 

Employer Strategies for Managing Health Care Costs and Improving Affordability

 

Traditionally, employers have addressed rising healthcare costs by shifting increased costs onto employees through higher premiums. While some employers are continuing to implement this strategy, most employers do not want benefit choices to interfere with their recruiting efforts due to the state of the labor market. Therefore, employers are using multiple strategies to manage their healthcare costs while attempting to improve affordability for employees.

 

These strategies include the following:

 

• Self-funding more of their cots with Health Reimbursement Arrangements
• Structuring payroll contributions to reduce healthcare costs for employees
• Employing programs to combat fraud, waste, and abuse
• Increasing healthcare plan budgets
• Contracting directly with high-quality, cost-competitive hospitals and physician networks
• Requiring employees to use cost-effective medical centers or obtain preapproval for scheduled inpatient services
• Offering employees health care navigation and concierge support services
• Evaluating prescription drug costs, particularly for specialty drugs
• Providing telemedicine or virtual care services
• Implementing new benefit programs, such as wellness programs, or using vendors
• Expanding voluntary benefit offerings, such as supplemental health insurance for catastrophic events
• Supporting and effectively managing employees with chronic conditions, long-term illnesses, and complex diseases
• Seeking help from insurance brokers to detail organizational healthcare spending and educate employees on shopping for healthcare services

 

Rising healthcare costs are causing employers to reevaluate healthcare plan designs and offerings. By gathering data and using it to predict where and when increased costs may occur, employers can determine the best strategies to address growing healthcare costs.

 

Summary

 

Employers of all sizes are looking to offer quality healthcare benefits in 2023 while focusing on employee affordability and accessibility. This will be difficult as prices increase and employer budgets shrink as a result of the current economic environment. Employers can act now to proactively prepare for anticipated healthcare price increases and find long-term solutions to mitigate rising costs.

New CA Employment Laws, Trends in Rx Spending, Telemedicine Challenges and More

Benefits in Brief

Employees can put an extra $200 into their health care flexible spending accounts (health FSAs) next year, the IRS announced on Oct. 18, as the annual contribution limit rises to $3,050, up from $2,850 in 2022. The increase is double the $100 rise from 2021 to 2022 and reflects recent inflation. 

Compliance News

A Group Health Plan Without a Public Website may satisfy the new transparency and price disclosure requirements if the plan’s TPA posts the required information on its public website - (Q 11, pg. 12) Federal regulators have now made it clear that self-funded employers can rely on their administrator (TPA) to make the necessary price disclosure files publicly available so long as there is a written agreement in place. One original federal interpretation was that employers had to provide that on their websites, and if they did not have a public website, they had to create one for that purpose. Of course, that seemed ludicrous. And thankfully, regulators now agree it was.

California Expands Who an Employee Can Care for Under the CFRA and California Paid Sick Leave Law - "Beginning January 1, 2023, employees throughout California will be able to use sick leave or take leave under the California Family Rights Act (CFRA) to care for a 'designated person' ... defined as any individual related by blood or whose association with the employee is equivalent to a family relationship. An employee can designate this person at the time they request leave." 

California Unleashes Last-Minute Onslaught of New Employment Legislation - California Governor Newsom recently signed several pieces of employment-related legislation into law including: Supplemental Paid Sick Leave Extension, an expansion of the California Family Rights Act and California Paid Sick Leave, Unpaid Bereavement Leave, Emergency Working Conditions, Reproductive Health Decisionmaking, and Cal/WARN Act Enforcement for Call Centers.  

Benefit News

Trends in Prescription Drug Spending, 2016-2021 - This HHS Issue Brief presents the Agency’s findings on prescription drug spending trends between 2016-2021. 

• In 2021, the U.S. health care system spent $603 billion on prescription drugs, before accounting for rebates, of which $421 billion was on retail drugs. 
• Spending growth on drugs was largely due to growth in spending per prescription, and to a lesser extent by increased utilization (i.e., more prescriptions).
• Expenditure growth was larger for non-retail drug expenditures (25%) than for retail expenditures (13%). 
• Between 2016 and 2021, the location where people received their drugs changed. Americans increasingly received their drugs from mail order pharmacies (35% increase), clinics (45% increase), and home health care (95% increase). During the same time period, there were decreases in drugs received through independent pharmacies (5% decrease), long term care facilities (17% decrease), and federal facilities (9% decrease). 
• Drug spending is heavily driven by a relatively small number of high-cost products. The cost of specialty drugs has continued to grow, totaling $301 billion in 2021, an increase of 43% since 2016. Specialty drugs represented 50% of total drug spending in 2021. While the majority (80%) of prescriptions that Americans fill are for generic drugs, brand name drugs accounted for 80% of prescription drug spending in both retail and non-retail settings, with little change over time. The top 10% of drugs by price make up fewer than 1% of all prescriptions but account for 15% of retail spending and 20%-25% of non-retail spending.
• Prescription drug spending trends have been less affected by the COVID-19 pandemic than health care services. 
• Several provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act address drug pricing, including allowing the Secretary of HHS to negotiate prices in Medicare Parts B and D for selected medications and introducing Medicare rebates for drug prices that rise faster than inflation. These provisions may impact future drug spending trends.
• There were 1216 products whose price increases during the twelve-month period from July 2021 to July 2022 exceeded the inflation rate of 8.5 percent for that time period. The average price increase for these drugs was 31.6 percent.

Telemedicine was made easy during COVID-19. Not any more - "Over the past year, nearly 40 states and Washington, D.C., have ended emergency declarations that made it easier for doctors to use video visits to see patients in another state, according to the Alliance for Connected Care, which advocates for telemedicine use. Some, like Virginia, have created exceptions for people who have an existing relationship with a physician. A few, like Arizona and Florida, have made it easier for out-of-state doctors to practice telemedicine. Doctors say the resulting patchwork of regulations creates confusion and has led some practices to shut down out-of-state telemedicine entirely. That leaves follow-up visits, consultations or other care only to patients who have the means to travel for in-person meetings."

Health and Wellness

Sore Throat, Now the Most Common Sign of COVID - "where once a fever and loss of taste or smell were early warning signs of the bug, the symptom tracking app has revealed the most common symptoms have changed."

People who sleep 5 hours or less a night face a higher risk of multiple health problems as they age - "The study, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine, took a closer look at a group of nearly 8,000 civil servants in the United Kingdom who had no chronic disease at age 50. Scientists asked the participants to report on how much sleep they got during clinic examinations every four to five years for the next 25 years. For those whose sleep was tracked at age 50, people who slept five hours or less a night faced a 30% higher risk that they would develop multiple chronic diseases over time than those who slept at least seven hours a night. At 60, it was a 32% increased risk, and at 70, it was a 40% greater risk."

Compliance and Benefit News, October 3, 2022

Compliance Updates

CA Legislature Expands Pay Transparency and Data Reporting Requirements; Extends COVID Supplemental Paid Sick Leave - "If signed into law by Governor Newsom, the current amended version of SB 1162 would increase employers’ pay transparency obligations as follows: 1) upon request, all employers will be required to provide the pay scale (i.e., hourly rate or salary range) for the position in which the employee is currently employed; 2) employers will be required to maintain records of job title and wage rate history for all employees for the duration of employment plus three years; and 3) all employers with 15 or more employees will be required to disclose pay scales in all job postings.

SB 1162 also expands California employers’ current pay data reporting requirements, which were initially passed into law in 2020 as part of the nation’s first such state-imposed obligations. The current requirements mandate that private employers with 100 or more employees report annually the number of their employees by race, ethnicity, and sex in specified job categories to the Department of Fair Employment and Housing (recently renamed the Civil Rights Department (CRD))."

California Slated to Usher in New Era of Pay Transparency in 2023: What California Employers Need to Know - "The Act expands pay data reporting to all California employers with 100 or more employees regardless of whether or not they are exempted from the EEO-1 filing requirement. The Act also significantly expands the types of pay information employers must report each year. The first deadline to report is the second Wednesday of May 2023 (May 10, 2023). Covered employers must now also provide the “median and mean hourly rate” within each job category (discussed above), for each combination of race, ethnicity, and sex."

Benefit News

The Cost Of Long COVID To Employers Is Skyrocketing -"two types of claims were sorted out: those labeled long COVID, and those attributed to diabetes. When the numbers were crunched, here’s what came up: Per-member employer spend on long COVID was on average $2,654.67, more than 26% higher than the average diabetic spend....The study also finds that long COVID patients reported a 3.6 times greater likelihood of missing work for medical reasons than plan members without the symptoms. ... [T]he average predicted cost of long COVID to patients is nearly $9,500 within the first six months following a diagnosis."

Segal Trend Survey, 7.4% Plan Increases in 2023 - "The projected annual cost trend for outpatient prescription drugs is expected to be approaching double-digit levels, the highest rate observed since 2015. Double-digit specialty Rx cost trend, mostly driven by price increases and new-to-market specialty drugs, continues to be a major driver of Rx cost trends. Survey respondents project per-person cost trends for open-access PPO/POS plans to be 7.4 percent."

Yet Another Reason to Look at Reference-Based-Pricing (another hidden cost shift against employers) - Employer plans pay an average of 224% of what Medicare pays for the same hospitalizations. This cost shift away from Medicare and onto employers has led to growth in employers moving away from traditional insurance and reverence-base-pricing their plans. I spoke about it with Armstrong and Getty in September here. And I wrote about it becoming a growing trend in the 2020s here. A new study now shows that the same hidden tax/cost shift is happing with Obamacare Exchange plans.

‘Gaming’ Of U.S. Patent System Is Keeping Drug Prices Sky High, Report Says - Four pharmaceutical companies have filed hundreds of patents to keep their drugs out of the hands of generic competition and prolong their “unprecedented profits,” according to a report published Thursday. The excessive use of the patent system — by drugmakers Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Regeneron and Bayer — keeps the prices of the medications at exorbitant levels, often at the expense of American consumers, according to the report from the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge, or I-MAK, a nonprofit organization that advocates drug patent reform. ... The U.S. patent system is meant to reward innovation by permitting drug companies to sell new medications on the market and barring other manufacturers from making generic versions for a set period of time — usually 20 years. Once the patent expires, generics are allowed on the market, often at a lower list price than the brand-name drug. But drugmakers often extend their patents by making small tweaks to the drugs, sustaining their monopolies for several years. Legal experts refer to this tactic as “evergreening...”

Health care spending for mental health disorders increases between 2013 and 2020 -

• Overall spending on mental health services increased from 6.8% to 8.2% between 2013 and 2020, according to a new study published by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI).
• The percentage of the population under the age of 65 with employment-based health coverage diagnosed with a mental health disorder increased from 14.2% in 2013 to 18.5% in 2020.
• Among enrollees with a mental health diagnosis, average annual spending on mental health care services increased from $1,987 to $2,380 between 2013 and 2020 — an average of 3% per year.

Physician Burnout Has Reached Distressing Levels, New Research Finds - "Results released this month and published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a peer-reviewed journal, show that 63 percent of physicians surveyed reported at least one symptom of burnout at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, an increase from 44 percent in 2017 and 46 percent in 2011. Only 30 percent felt satisfied with their work-life balance, compared with 43 percent five years earlier."

The perks that work to retain employees now - "Among employed adults, 56% say that the work schedule attracts them most in their current role ­— a factor valued more by women (61%) than men (51%). Almost half of the workers surveyed say that colleagues (48%), fair pay (46%), and work-life balance (43%) are most appealing, with 34% also appreciating their health benefits. In fact, 58% of Gen Z are attracted to their job because of colleagues and work friends, while men (52%) are more likely than women (39%) to be drawn to their job because they are paid fairly."

Health and Wellness

Antidepressants Work Better Than Sugar Pills Only 15 Percent of the Time - "Five years ago Mark Horowitz seemed an unlikely skeptic of psycho-pharmaceuticals. He had been taking the popular antidepressant Lexapro virtually every day for 15 years. He was so fascinated by the drugs that he spent three years hunched over a dish of human brain cells in a laboratory at King's College London, measuring the effect of human stress hormones and drugs like Prozac and Zoloft. Then, when he tried to wean himself off the medication, he suffered panic attacks, sleep disruptions, and depression so debilitating that he had to move back to his parents' house in Australia—symptoms that he says were far worse than anything he experienced prior to going on the drugs. He went online and found thousands of others in a similar pickle. They had been unable to kick one of the psychiatric drugs known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs, which include Lexapro, Zoloft, and Prozac, among others. Since withdrawal symptoms were thought to be mild and temporary, many of them, like him, had been told by doctors that they were experiencing a relapse of their depression. ..."

How to maintain peak brain health: Scientists say it comes down to these 3 factors - "The three identified keys to strong brain health are:

1. Physical exercise
2. Social activity
3. Strong, passionate interests and hobbies

Simple, right? Let’s break down each factor a bit further. ..."

CDC no longer recommends universal masking in health facilities - "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer recommends universal masking in health care settings, unless the facilities are in areas of high COVID-19 transmission. The agency quietly issued the updates as part of an overhaul to its infection control guidance for health workers published late Friday afternoon [Sept. 23rd]. It marks a major departure from the agency’s previous recommendation for universal masking."

Being unhappy or lonely speeds up aging — even more than smoking - "Being unhappy or experiencing loneliness accelerates the aging process more than smoking, according to new research. An international team says unhappiness damages the body’s biological clock, increasing the risk for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease, and other illnesses. The team reports that they detected aging acceleration among people with a history of stroke, liver and lung diseases, smoking, and in people with a vulnerable mental state. Interestingly, feeling hopeless, unhappy, and lonely displayed a connection to increasing a patient’s biological age more than the harmful impact of smoking."