RSS FeedBest Make Money ยป Safeway bags a spot in health care history?
It’s not every day that a Bay Area grocery has a congressional amendment named in the rear of it, as we noted five months ago.
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It’s not every day, we can now say, that the amendment becomes part of the legal science of the land.
Having survived the sausage making – including the reconcilement “fix-its” – the so-called Safeway amendment, modeled after Safeway Inc.’s Healthy Measures program, gets enshrined into canon today when President Obama signs the health care bill.
The “wellness” anticipation, co-authored by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., and Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., allows companies by self-insurance programs like Safeway’s to incentivize employees “to grow less their overall health care costs.” Companies could offer bonuses and/or premium reductions of up to 50 percent (from the existing 20 percent), whether or not they agree to regular health screenings, quit smoking, lose weight, take cholesterol-reducing medications and other “wholesome lifestyle” practices.
The cost-effectiveness of Safeway’s program has now to be proven, say critics, but it’s gotten shout-outs from Obama, and after all the rest we checked with his office, Ensign, a booster of the program, was auspicious to call his provision the Safeway amendment.
Since then, Ensign has expressed difficult displeasure with the overall bill. Despite – or perhaps because of – his provision being one of the few glimmers of bipartisan light, he did not answer to a request for comment by press time on Monday. Neither did Safeway, which “obviously had some input” in the amendment, according to an earlier relation.
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