A coworker of mine sent me this article from BusinessWeek some time ago and have been wanting to comment on it for some time, so I’m going to lay out some thoughts and see what you all think.

For the lazy, the article is best summarized as a look into the oddities of the corporate health plan of Scott’s Miracle-Gro Company in Marysville, OH. This company has completely changed the normal paradigm of a corporate health plan being just another benefit provided by the business to its employees and has instead taken and active and proactive approach to their employees’ health, up to and including termination.

In other words, they are very passionate (like Hannibal Lector passionate) about keeping their employees healthy, and if the worker doesn’t comply with their urgings and recommendations — well, don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. They are tobacco-free and count it as one of the ‘drugs’ on their required drug tests; fail and you are fired.

Not that they haven’t helped the employees out a ton; far from it. They have installed a $5 million exercise center that has almost every sort of equipment and facility known to man to work on your body, offers free prescription drugs, has on-site doctors, counselors, etc. and offers personal coaches for a low fee. Employees either take a health assessment or pay $40/month extra in premiums — $107/month more if they don’t follow the health coach’s recommendation based on that assessment.

It raises a lot of questions, not only about legal aspects but about ethical ones. How much can employers intrude into the lives of their employees? Obviously, they have some stake in what happens because if they are covering the health premium, they have a vested interest in the subject — money. But Scott’s has taken it even farther, essentially saying, “If you’re unhealthy, we don’t want you working here.”

“Five years ago, if you had told me, Hey, you better quit smoking or you might not get a job,’ I would have laughed. Here I am five years later, and I can’t get a job.”

I don’t think there is any doubt by anyone as to whether or not people are getting fatter and more unhealthy; I certainly struggle with it all the time, and the fact is, the amount of pre-processed, pre-cooked, pre-assembled food products available today isn’t helping. My schedule often pushes towards these sorts of meals, too, as it’s very hectic and I have little time to spend several hours cooking, eating, and cleaning up — many days, it’s hard enough to get something microwaved in time, let alone anything else.

My job doesn’t exactly encourage exercise, either — I’m sitting on my butt for 9 hours a day, plus X number of hours at night while I do my evening jobs, totaling somewhere between 12 and 15 hours of sitting per day. More than once have I dreamed about having a mini treadmill under my desk or something.

I won’t go into much detail about the health program at my dayjob, but suffice to say that they’ve made great efforts this year to promote good health and encourage people to move around more than they tend to. It’s still very hard to incorporate into my schedule, but I’ve attempted to take part in some of it. Of late I’ve been bad and have resorted to driving to work and generally not paying attention to what I’m shoving in my gob, something I really must stop doing. After all, this is summer — what a better time to get fit than now?

However, the situation at Scott’s is obviously one of the extreme and perhaps concern. How far can the health “recommendations” and evaluations go? What if they find a mentally unstable person — can you require counseling? Schedule antidepressants for the perpetually down? How about bad or troubled marriages, could a company evaluate something like this and strictly advise a revision of your sexual life? Wrong religion — here’s a new Bible and a corporate preacher to help you through it?

Obviously, I’m sliding down a pretty slick slope here and the quagmire goes pretty deep from there, so let’s not get tangled too deeply in the “what ifs”; however, one has to start considering where, if anywhere, the lines exist to control this sort of thing, and if these sorts of regulations and controls are allowed for health care, how much farther could they go with other things they have invested interest in?

Say for instance my vacation time. Since my corporation provides it as a benefit to me, they clearly want me to benefit from it. Much of what I benefit from it is the simple notion of not being at work 24/7/365 — it’s a morale issue. But what if the company wanted to make sure I was getting a “good” vacation? If I chose to sit at home for a week on the couch, eating Cheetos, drinking Mt. Dew, staying up all hours, and watching The Best of Debbie Does, do they have a right to dictate otherwise?

Clearly it is not and will not be a cut-and-dried issue for a long time, and you can bet that the bad health trend, if it continues, will only make companies consider the above sort of strictness or give up the providing of health benefits at all, which leads to all sorts of other issues. You will see employees subscribe to these tenants as they appear and/or protest and fall away, and don’t even get me started on the unions — I can’t imagine the wrenches that throws into the works.

So, until then — if you have health goals, keep working on them, and I’ll try to get off my lazy ass and work on mine, because you never know — it just might help you retain your job someday.