Journal of health politics, policy and law
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Workplace wellness programs are written into law as exceptions to otherwise protective antidiscrimination provisions, and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act expands employers' ability to treat workers differently based on their health. Rather than assume that wellness programs promote health and save money, here I approach them as legally sanctioned discrimination. What exactly wellness discrimination might look like in practice across many contexts is an open question, but there is good reason to be wary of the power of wellness to create and reproduce hierarchy, to promote homogeneity, narrow-mindedness, and moralism about how to live one's life, and to cover for discrimination based on health, weight, income, age, pregnancy, and disability.
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This article examines the concept of wellness through a comparative political economy and legal framework. It asks whether wellness, an increasingly defined term within US federal and state legislative instruments including, for example, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is primarily a US-centric phenomenon. Or is wellness, in its various different guises, a worldwide phenomenon? By focusing on three distinctly different jurisdictions - the United States, Germany, and Australia - this article examines wellness through the lens of employers, the health care system, employment and tort law, and the greater political economy. It notes that while improving employee health, well-being, and productivity is common across the three countries and their respective cultures, the focus on wellness as a distinct legal concept is unique to the United States.