Workplace Wellness Industry Meets Its Match at They Said What?

Al Lewis and Vik Khanna, co-authors of Surviving Workplace Wellness with Your Dignity, Finances, and Major Organs Intact, are pleased to announce the launch of their new website, They Said What? They Said What? is the world’s only website devoted to the foibles, fables, and pratfalls of the workplace wellness industry. They Said What? regales readers with hilarious and pointed critiques of the clinically and mathematically impossible success claims of workplace wellness vendors, benefits consultants, actuaries, and employers who really ought to know how to treat their employees better.

“Thanks largely to the total lack of adult supervision, the workplace wellness industry has attracted an army of innumerates and sociopaths for us to lampoon.  They can’t fight back without creating a news cycle, which they know could confuse their customers by containing facts.” said Al Lewis, a Harvard-trained lawyer and health economist, who is widely credited with having invented the field of disease management–but who backed off when he realized the industry’s numbers didn’t add up.

Al’s colleague and business partner, Vik Khanna, a Johns Hopkins graduate, notes that wellness is just a hangover from the era of health insurance that saw the emergence of managed care. “Actually,” said Khanna, “it’s more like a hangnail…an annoying pain that just won’t go away. By the way, if you doubt the claim that Al invented disease management, just Google the question ‘Who invented disease management?’ and Google answers: ‘Al did.’”

Lewis and Khanna are the workplace wellness industry’s most irrepressible, relentless, and fearless critics, “taking appellations and kicking posteriors,” as Al says. Their recent essay in Health Affairs, with Shana Montrose, became a wellness classic virtually upon release. Their fact-based criticism of the industry is starting to resonate. Their work has been praised and promoted by sources as politically diverse as The Los Angeles Times, The Federalist, and The Incidental Economist.

“Our goal,” said Lewis, “Is to get employers, employees and policymakers to see the reality of the damage done by ‘pry, poke, prod and punish’ programs. An entire industry has been turned loose on working Americans based on what can charitably be described as deliberate misrepresentations. For instance, our latest blog post asks why wellness supporters still cite the 5-year-old study that said wellness has a 3.27-to-1 ROI when the author herself has subsequently acknowledged on multiple occasions that there is no proof of any ROI.”

Added Khanna, “No one should be forced to answer intrusive and pointless health questions, submit to annual blood tests, or be sent to the doctor unnecessarily, when the evidence specifically says not to, in order to avoid overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment. Workplace wellness, as currently practiced, insults the dignity and invades the privacy of working Americans without any upside in cost savings or health improvement.”

About They Said What?

They Said What is the world’s only website devoted to the foibles, fables, and pratfalls of the workplace wellness industry. Started and run by Al Lewis and Vik Khanna, They Said What regales readers with hilarious and pointed critiques of the wildly improbable and mathematically impossible success claims of workplace wellness vendors, insurance brokers, and employers who really ought to know how to treat their employees better.

Al and Vik are co-authors of Surviving Workplace Wellness with Your Dignity, Finances, and Major Organs Intact, which is available at Amazon.com.