Health Insurance Subsidizes Fitness. Part 1 ? SWVTC ? everyone ...

Club networks are making alliances with health insurance providers that pay their policy holders to join and participate in member clubs.

Fitness providers have long known the value of offering preventive as opposed to curative health care. And, particularly in the past 10 years, the fitness industry has achieved notable success in an effort to close the gap between medicine and fitness. Examples include employee wellness programs, physician referral networks, health risk screenings and in-house physical therapy programs.

One smaller area of medical fitness that is gaining popularity is the alliance of health clubs with insurance providers, including health maintenance organizations (HMOs), preferred provider organizations (PPOs) and traditional indemnity providers, all of whom are now pitching healthy living to subscribers as a means of lowering healthcare costs.

How it works

Under such agreements, insurance subscribers are rewarded for maintaining health club memberships via cash back on premiums, or subsidies that typically average $200 per year toward their membership fees.

This, of course, is attractive to health clubs because it represents an opportunity to acquire a large number of new members at little cost, and it?s of benefit to insurance providers because healthier subscribers mean reduced medical payouts, which equal, cha-ching!, greater profits.

The idea is not new ? the first such agreements began more than 10 years ago ? but health club/insurance alliances have been slow in developing, with only about 40 of the more than 2,700 health maintenance organizations in the United States offering incentive benefits for health club members.

Still, many industry professionals are working to help subsidized fitness achieve mainstream status. ?For years, the people who have benefited from health insurance coverage have been those who are either sick or injured,? says Dave Pickering, president of the International Fitness Club Network (IFCN), Providence, R.I., which specializes in creating agreements between insurers and clubs. ?This movement represents something that everyone, including healthy people, can get excited about.?

Our site offer generic drugs at low prices that can not be beaten. This discount pharmacy is focused to bringing you, your loved one the low-cost brand or generic prescription medications online.

Source: http://www.swvtc.com/health-insurance-subsidizes-fitness-part-1.html

los angeles clippers los angeles clippers charlize theron telenav telenav wade phillips wade phillips