Obama stresses prevention, wellness to corporations

President Obama hosted a meeting with corporate and union bigwigs on healthcare for the second consecutive day Tuesday, this time to talk with large employers about programs they’ve put in place to encourage employees to use preventive medicine.

“One element of cost is that where companies are able to take initiatives to make their employees healthier, to give them incentives and mechanisms to improve their wellness and to prevent disease, companies see their bottom lines improve,” Obama said after the meeting.

The president singled out companies like Safeway, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson for programs they’ve used to, for example, get workers to cut smoking, lose weight and exercise.

“If we can do that in individual companies, there’s no reason why we can’t do that for a country as a whole,” Obama said. “All this designed to save taxpayers money, save businesses money and ultimately make the American people healthier and happier and make sure that we’re getting a better bang for our healthcare dollar.”

On Monday, Obama made a big splash by meeting with corporate, union and trade association executives to discuss their pledge to reduce national healthcare spending by $2 trillion over 10 years.

– Jeffrey Young