Chronic Health Issues and the Public Workplace

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1. Analyze the issues involved in controlling costs for disabled and chronically ill employees. Discuss two major challenges and recommend two strategies your agency will implement.

Two of the major challenges in the U.S. that are driving up health care costs for disabled and chronically ill employees are better quality of healthcare and prescription drugs and longevity of life (1).
On the issue of better quality of healthcare and prescription drugs; Americans are living longer based on the advancements in healthcare technology and prescription drugs that have been created to help manage chronic illnesses and disabilities. So, to realize the benefit of this technology and the medications, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses are utilizing more and more of the scarce health care resources that exist. This is driving the costs of employee sponsored healthcare through the roof. Employers are seeing a drastic increase in the amount of employees who suffer from chronic illnesses and disabilities that require long term management, costly prescriptions, and care. Many of these employees are being diagnosed at much younger ages which mean even longer managed care will need to be given (1).

This is leading to the second major problem. With the advances in medical prescriptions and technology existing to help manage chronic illness and disability, more and more people are remaining in the workforce and their life expectancy continues to increase in the U.S. Along with this increase in the number of people working with chronic illness, the age at which employees are retiring is increasing as well (1).

So, this combination of having more ill employees working and reaming in the workforce for much longer periods of time is another crushing cost ...