Cynthia works for a corporation that employs about 1,000 people.

When the managers of her company took a serious look at the cost of providing health care for their employees, they made plans for letting the employees participate in cost control rather than cutting benefits.

The plan included self-monitored and reported exercise, attendance at educational seminars and yearly health check-ups with appropriate blood testing.

The individual employees could opt in or opt out of the proposed plan.

Those who opted in would receive a substantial additional income check each month as they followed the plan’s requirements.

The majority of the employees chose to participate.

When Cynthia’s blood testing reports came back, they showed that she was at high risk for myocardial infarct (heart attack).

And Cynthia was only 29 years of age.

Her physician prescribed aspirin to reduce blood clotting tendency and a statin to help reduce her blood cholesterol.

Additionally, Cynthia began a supervised progressive exercise program.

Now, a year later, Cynthia’s blood tests show she is at low risk for heart attack and she is feeling fine.

She did not have the heart attack that could have happened.

And how does her company feel about Cynthia’s progress?

Management is thrilled.

It is the very kind of intervention that they hoped would happen.

Medical and surgical treatment of heart attacks is very expensive. Stints, bypass surgeries and valve replacements can increase costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars in each instance.

It does not require very many of those interventions to be avoided in order to much more than underwrite the preventive program. And there are less lost working days and less costs of training replacement workers.

This next Monday I will drive several hours north in Michigan to again supervise the drawing of blood specimens for the company employing Cynthia.

Each participating employee will be seen by a physician prior to the blood testing. The testing will include testing for cholesterol, triglycerides, sodium, potassium, urea, creatinine, glucose (blood sugar), and enzymes which reflect liver function.

I will have several qualified persons to do the drawing of blood specimens.

Each can draw blood on about 20 persons per hour.

When the specimen drawing is complete, we may have seen as many as 400 people.

Each specimen is centrifuged; packaged with a requisition into a plastic envelope and then will be sent off to a licensed laboratory for testing.

The results of this program have already justified our time and expense in helping increase the number of healthy days of these employees.

Bill Bradford retired to the rigors of a small farm in Pokagon Township.

He has served as director of clinical laboratories in physician group practices and hospitals.