You claim in your post that”it is obvious that prevention saves money. Unfortunately real evidence from real peer-reviewed medical journal says otherwise. This is the article from New England Journal of Medicine: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/7/661 where they actually looked at health care costs and prevention. Unlike politicians or company policy-makers, the authors of this paper actually looked at real evidence. Their conclusion – some preventive measures save money, others are very expensive. See for yourself.

How can prevention not save money? In order to understand it, you need to understand two concepts in epidemiology – Number Needed to Treat (NNT) and Number Needed to Screen (NNS). This will explain to you why it is not at all obvious to most doctors and epidemiologists that preventive care saves money. This is wiki page on NNT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_needed_to_treat
I strongly suggest that you learn it. You see, yes preventing an illness in one person is cheaper than treating it in that person, but it is often the case that in order to prevent illness in one you need to treat or test hundreds, even thousands for many years. And this is far from cheap.

There are also unintended consequences, like someone who over-exercises may have higher rate of injuries, or someone who goes on prescription drugs because of the blood test that this company requires having side effects.

from the referenced article “… It also conducts annual blood, vision and hearing tests.”
An yearly blood test for everyone isn’t even recommended by USPSTF, and neither is annual physical:(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0815/is_7_30/ai_n14858621. Why are company bureacrats more qualified than USPSTF – an organization that includes a number of experts in the field actually qualified to look at the evidence? If there is no evidence that benefits of a test even outweight the risks, how can it save money?

One other problem with company requiring tests, any tests, is that contrary to popular belief tests aren’t risk-free. None of the tests is perfect, so there are false positives. In some cases – many false positives. After 10 years of yearly tests the risk of having at least one false positive may be very high. An example: if the risk of a false positive after a test is 10%, the risk of having at least one false positives in 10 years is around 75%. False positives aren’t harmless. Aside from anxiety, they lead to more invasive tests. These invasive tests may have real and serious risks of pain, long-term effects, even death. As one cardiologist friend told me – “nobody dies of a stress test, but stress test has false positives, false positives are evaluated with cardio catheterization that has 1/1000 risk of stroke”. This is just one example. Then there are CT scans and radiation. While these risks are usually small, when you start testing a large number of symptomless people, the probability of benefit is very small as well. And if you talk about cost – how is testing a thousand, even tens of thousands of people, evaluating numerous false positives to prevent one case of serious desease saves money? Then there is an issue of “overdiagnosis and overtreatment”, but you can look it up yourself. Google for it. It is really fascinating. Do you know that with some deseases more screened people are diagnosed than non-screened? Do you know the effect screening programs have on incidence of a desease? Look it up. How would having more people treated for a desease than without a test save money?

Mind you, I am not telling you shouldn’t have test. Some tests may indeed save your life. But you and your doctor should be the ones to decide if a test makes sense for you based on recommendations, your age, risk factors, and your personal preference. Not your employer.

Jim

Result? 80% participation in the tobacco program and 100% in the physical. We have 1,250 people at my company and I’ve heard stories of people getting physicals for the first time in 20 years. They’ve detected early stages of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments and have been able to intervene early to start the fight against the problems NOW.

I think it’s been a fantastic success. But a body fat analysis? Required? I don’t think I’d want HR knowing my numbers on that!