PremierSource

Employee Benefit News reports that Dr. James Rippe, cardiologist and founder of the Rippe Lifestyle Institute, is encouraging employers to deal "as aggressively with obseity as they do with any other disease."

Why should employers care? It's the 80:20 rule— 20% of the workforce causes 80% of the costs. On average, overweight people have 13.8% higher annual health care costs than those at a healthy weight. That number more than doubles to 37.7% for obese individuals. 

But since "obesity is not a reimbursable diagnosis," Rippe explains, it tends to be significantly underreported as a medical condition. Doctors aren't trained to tell patients that their disease is being fat, so they cite specific diseases that often result from excess weight, such as diabetes, heart disease and muscular-skeletal pain, Rippe explains.

...

Rippe, who partnered with Weight Watchers to write the book "Weight Loss that Lasts," suggests that implementing a weight management program in the workplace, whether outsourced or done internally, can have a significant and nearly immediate impact on productivity, health care costs and absenteeism.

You can read the full article here.