The relationship between wellness participation and health care benefit utilization

To examine the relationship between participation in a wellness program and the amount of absenteeism and medical claims, seven years of retrospective absenteeism and medical claims records were collected for 207 employees (pre- and postwellness intervention) and entered into a database. A proportional stratified random sample of workers by wellness participation was selected. While there was no significant change in the amount of sick leave taken over time, a log transformation revealed a significant increase in the dollar amount of medical claims over time, particularly for the middle-aged group of employees. This confirms that wellness intervention slowed the rate of increasing claims among middle-aged participants after just three years of wellness intervention.     

Prospective screening of diagnostic testing: a valuable tool

The elimination of unneeded services is a key to reducing medical costs and enhancing quality of care. Diagnostic tests have been a target of efforts to reduce costs primarily because they are discretionary and often appear to be unnecessary. Believing that the concept of prior review for many diagnostic tests is a good one, this pilot study sought to evaluate prospectively the propriety of diagnostic tests ordered during the first half of 1989 on individuals insured through a major insurance carrier. A physician review found that 21% of the tests were deemed inappropriate, leading to the conclusion that prospective review can be an effective means of screening inappropriately ordered tests.     

The right cure for health care

An aging population with nearly unlimited access to high-priced doctors and technology is pushing medical costs skyward. Managed care is the best way to bring them down.     

Struggling to save our kids

Many more than ever face the crises of childhood: violence, drugs, bad schools, poverty, divorce, or two parents at work. And no one seems to care.     

Umpire and batsman: Is it cricket to be both?

The paper is a response to Richard De George's essay, Theological Ethics and Business Ethics. It defends the possibility of theologically oriented approaches to business ethics by pointing out certain deficiencies in business ethics narrowly based on the premisses of analytic moral philosophy. In particular it argues, in a manner consistent with Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), that such a program of business ethics is insufficiently critical of its own roots in the social fiction of bureaucratic rationality. After showing how this ideology governs De George's negative judgments on theological approaches to business ethics, the author outlines a program of critical reflection that would draw from the intellectual traditions of both theology and philosophy in order to facilitate a dialogue in business ethics that no longer is captive in the Iron Cage of bureaucratic rationality. Dennis P. McCann is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at De Paul University. He has served on the faculties of Reed College and Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Christian Realism and Liberation Theology (1981) and a co-author of Polity and Praxis: A Program for American Practical Theology (1985).