Some of us do care about the health of our employees. But it really depends heavily on the sector and role you're in.
Dude, what? No company wants their people to be sick. Sick people cause down time, and lost productivity. My boss may feel bad if I go down for a few days because of the flu, but the company is concerned because I'm not at my post, doing the job that I am paid for. So sure, there's a lack of human element in there from the corporate perspective, but it has nothing to do with the cost of insurance. Our company of 30k plus people is doing lots of things to encourage healthy living. It's the people working for the company that tend to resist a lot of that and still eat crappy, etc.
CO, you should try to get on the board of some medium size company. Buy a few shares and try to get some support. You could then vent some of that anger.
No, really? Hehehe... : ) Some companies are shit, you're right. I'd wager that almost without exception they are companies that don't need a require of talent out of their particular labor market.
Well, you're in an adversarial position now. You want something from them and they don't want to pay for it. If you are on the board you would be the one helping to decide who doesn't get what.
One of the things that I like about the CVS approach is that they barely give any pretense of caring about the health of their employees. They're just saying that if your lifestyle (smoking, eating, exercise) drives up costs you're going to pay more. If your lifestyle brings down costs you'll pay less. Seems fair to me.
Lifestyle encompasses much more than what you eat and if you smoke. How much drinking is OK? How do you determine what your employee is drinking, let alone other drug use, even if it's recreational. How fast do you drive? How is that determined? What sports do you play? How does the employer monitor all this?
You put a little chip in everyone's head like the Progressive Insurance company's auto insurance "snap shot" device so it can log were you've been, what you've done, how fast you traveled, what you ate, what you drank, what you've said, what you smoked, who you screwed, etc., etc., etc. Law enforcement and the feds will want to tap into that info, too. Did you see in the news today that some sheriff wants to put ankle monitors on all senior citizens? I guess so they don't get lost for starters.