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Fitbit Wants To Help Corporations Track Employee Health
jfruh writes: Fitbit is pitching its iconic fitness trackers to businesses as a tool to save money on health care costs. Many companies have wellness programs to encourage workers to exercise more, and Fitbit will help employers quantify (and monitor) employee progress. “We think virtually every company will incorporate fitness trackers into their corporate wellness programs,” Fitbit CFO Bill Zerella said
Lord help us all!
Maybe they can come monitor my food when I'm at home or out about town, too?
And maybe they can monitor when I wake and sleep.
And maybe monitor what kind of air I breath in my part of town.
And maybe they can just get a direct pipe into all my medical records? I mean, since apparently we give no fucks anymore, right?
I have a better idea: You hire me to do a fucking job and I'll do the fucking job and we'll leave our involvement with each other right fucking there.
Old news, my company started it last year. It is an optional program, but you are necouraged as you get a free fitbit, and money if you hit certain goals.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
That's what always creeps me out about any sort of "employee wellness" programs in the workplace. There is an all-too-fine line between an optional program with fun rewards and a de facto mandatory program with harsh punishments.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's not remotely "fat shaming". Healthy people have lower health care costs on average. Everyday people like me and presumably you want to spend less on insurance, which means we need to actually cost less. Programs like this (my employer does it, and I participate) don't stigmatize you in any way if you don't participate. I didn't for the first few years it was in place. No one said a word about it. I finally did because I felt like I was leaving free money on the table.
There's zero stress. You carry a tiny device around, sync it now and again, lose it from time to time, find it again, and there's more money in your paycheck.
I work for the University of Washington (so I'm a state employee), and starting with 2015 our health plan has included a "wellness incentive" which, if met, drops $125 off an employee's annual deductible. For this current year, it was a simple matter of making a couple attestations ("I don't smoke", "I exercise at least 3 days a week"). For 2016, though, it's gotten a bit more intrusive - one of the ways you can earn points towards the incentive is to record daily step counts and exceed 35000 steps per week, which you could either do manually or by giving the website access to your FitBit data (it also supported several other trackers). Other ways to earn points included "Try Tai Chi", "Fill out an Advance Directive", "See a Mentor", "No Stress Mondays", and so on.
Given the move Washington State has made towards both intrusiveness and nanny-state-dom, and given that by state law pretty much all our job-related data is public record, I would not be surprised if at some point people who gave permission to access their fitness trackers to find that someone in the monitoring chain started checking when activity is occurring. This could be a problem for someone if, like me, they often don't get a conventional lunch hour due to job duties. I'm often eating after 1pm (or even after 2pm) simply because it works better with tasks I'm doing - so when I go for my lunchtime walk, it's not usually between 12 and 1. Fortunately I'm not naive enough to give them access to my Garmin Viviosmart data, but a less paranoid person could end up with a nasty surprise come annual evaluation time.
#DeleteChrome
That's the concern. Optional benefits (on campus gym, free/reduced cost gym membership, paid personal trainers, reimbursement for exercise classes, paying for home equipment) are cool. Forcing people is not. And if an employer is tracking my health, that falls into category 2 not category 1.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
...and yet many companies use United Healthcare, which has this neat little program where nicotine users (cigs, dip, vape, whatever) get to pay an extra $70/mo. for their health insurance, and if your spouse smokes? That'll be $140/mo that you get pay, please.
Oh, you don't partake and claim yourself exempt? You get random annual bodily-fluid testing where you get to prove that you're nicotine-free.
Did I mention that if caught smoking when you said you didn't? You get fired for-cause.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Actually, United Healthcare program you are referring to covers use of tobacco products. The FDA doesn't currently categorize e-cigarettes as a tobacco product so they don't count, for now. I know because we have United Healthcare and I filled out this form about a month ago and it specifically mentions that e-cigs are not currently recognized as tobacco products.
I predict the guy at Home Depot working the paint mixer will be a top performer.
t
We're headed that way. Commerce and government will become indistinguishable from each other.
We have a (laughably ineffective) separation of Church and State.
We desperately need to even more fiercely deploy and enforce a separation of Commerce and State. No more lobbying by religious groups. No more lobbying by commerce -- or proxies of, at least not on the positively obscene way it is being done today
And by State I also include the federales.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
That's the concern. Optional benefits (on campus gym, free/reduced cost gym membership, paid personal trainers, reimbursement for exercise classes, paying for home equipment) are cool. Forcing people is not. And if an employer is tracking my health, that falls into category 2 not category 1.
I have not yet heard of an employer actually forcing people (and I would hear of things being in the benefits administration field). But, I have seen employers raise the price of health insurance, and then offer a "discount" for participation in healthy incentives.
The Penn State Wellness fiasco? Unless you think that what amounts to a yearly fine is not forced,, I'm pretty surprised that a professional in benefits administration field would not have heard of that. It was dropped due ot employee outrage (some were even daring to breathe the dreaded "U" word, but it was going to be forced until cooler minds intervened. I posted a link above, but here it is again http://lcbpsusenate.blogspot.c...
Any thoughts?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.