Article contains a good concise primer on the two ways people think about health (insurance): risk sharing or moral hazard. Risk sharing: exactly what it sounds like; we share the risk of spendy health problems using pooled resources. Moral hazard: well, if we make it too easy for people to get that protection they're not gonna take care of their health; "moochers" will intentionally get sick, etc.

Moral hazard is a crock of shit. I mean that both in the sense of policies based in it shit on the nondeserving, and in that it doesn't fit modern theories of personal and population health. I mean, I'm a public health person, I extremely don't like it anyway! but it's the thinking that's behind conservative health-related policies: it's for the deserving. If we make it easy to get, people won't work hard. "it" = insurance, homes, food, TANF, etc.

Hoooly shit. "Program features have ranged from the useful (fresh produce sales on corporate campuses) to the dubious (long-form questionnaires assessing workers’ mental health) to the creepily invasive (‘‘laughter cards’’ which ask workers to record whether they experienced levity at least 10 times in a day)."

That's not even considering the biometric assessments considered as standard. My employer does not need to know my cholesterol levels, blood pressure, etc; not sure whether that counts as more or less invasive than "laughter cards" (?!?!?!?wtf).

And weight-oriented wellness programs (which most of them are, at least a little) don't end up saving money for the employer on healthcare, nor do they end up with long-term weight loss on the group level. None of which is surprising if you take a health at every size perspective (#HAES heck yeah) vs the fatness hyperfocus that happens in healthcare today.

Wellness programs not about our health, or about fatness. They exist in order to give employers more perceived control over our bodies, with a stated goal of increased productivity and an underlying goal of worker control.

I don't know how much the article is going to tie this into wider ideas about health--diet culture, etc--and the ways they're heavily gendered or raced. but i'm gonna put a pin in that as a potential thing to write about, since wellness programs and the 1970s-ish boom of diet culture have the same philosophical baseline and...well...i'm interested. But if i go into it now i'm never gonna actually finish reading this thing lol.