West Virginia PEIA: Innovative Steps to Improve Long Term Health of West Virginia

This past week the West Virginia Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA) announced a creative and proactive health initiative to improve the health of West Virginians and move toward keeping future health care costs down for state and public school employees and ultimately for West Virginia taxpayer. Charleston Gazette's Phil Kabler reports on the initiative in "PEIA insurees can offset premiums increase."

The Improve Your Score initiative is a part of PEIA's Pathways to Wellness. PEIA announced that state and public school employees will have no health care premium increase this year if they comply with two requirements.The two requirements:

• Undergo a four-step wellness screening to measure waist circumference, total cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood glucose. Completion of the screening provides a $10-a-month premium discount.
• Submit an affidavit verifying they have filed an advanced directive for end-of-life care, sometimes called a "living will." That provides an additional $4-a-month discount.

Wonderful to see West Virginia, often more known nationally for unhealthy news, taking a proactive approach to improving West Virginians health by promoting a wellness activity and encouraging end of life care planning. Both initiatives will help to curb the long term impact on our state's health care cost problems and help West Virginia's become more active in understanding and managing their (un)healthy problems.