Business & Economic Developer Support

Why is it so compelling for employers and economic development leaders to support our work?:

• Healthier employees are more productive on the job (10-20+% more based on Milken Institute data on GDP shortfalls).
• Healthier employees have much less absenteeism.
• Healthier employees create much lower health costs for employers.
• A high percentage of healthy employees allows employers to pay higher salaries.
• Investing in improving children’s health is excellent corporate public relations.
• At a state level, a healthier population is a major & unique economic development asset (per above: lower cost, more productive, etc).

Unfortunately, if you think that employers can retroactively improve their employees’ health with health promotion programs, in spite of their unhealthy habits—the evidence is discouraging:

• Employer health improvement programs have a very mixed track record in improving employee health.
• The relatively small minority of employees who participate heavily in them are often more health conscious anyway—many with healthier habits already, with or without workplace health promotion.
• So the employer is often just ending up subsidizing things that the more health-oriented employees would in many cases be doing anyway.
• At any rate, there is no consistent evidence that employees improve their health habits enough due to employer health promotion programs that the employer significantly reduces its organization’s health spending

Two successive Milken Institute studies calculated the huge business & economic downside of not addressing epidemic inactivity & unhealthy nutrition:

The Good News:

With Healthy Students Healthy State, employers and economic development leaders share costs with the state and Medicaid to fund better whole population health.

Then future employees enter the workforce on a healthier, less expensive and more productive trajectory—from the outset.

State educational attainment levels have traditionally been a key economic development talking point. Health attainment levels could be as well.

What if those employers had invested in a healthier future workforce through schools over the past several decades, when child health declined so severely? Their current workforce would be more productive and have lower health costs.

Breakthrough Economic Development Differentiator

State educational attainment levels have traditionally been a key economic development talking point.

More details on how our work supports business and economic development are available.

In turn, we ask for your support for Healthy Students Healthy State.

We would love to discuss this with you!

Contact Us Now