Do employees participating in voluntary health promotion programs incur lower health care costs?

During the past two decades there has been a rapid increase in the number of wellness activities within public and private companies. A rationale for implementing worksite wellness programs has been the assumption that wellness programming can contain health-related costs. This investigation examined the relationship between health insurance costs and employee wellness program participation using a sample of 1757 university employees over a 3-year period. Based upon empirical models and analytic techniques that are appropriate for these investigations, the authors suggest that voluntary wellness programs may face a serious adverse selection problem in that relatively unhealthy individuals may self-select into wellness programming. Specifically, the authors show that employees who participate in worksite wellness programming incur higher rather than lower health claims costs.