United HealthCare's Stacy Cohen just alerted us to that carrier's new health care plan "designed to help the rapidly growing numbers of diabetics and pre-diabetics manage their conditions more effectively while controlling employers' escalating costs of insuring them."
Currently, the program is available only to self-insured groups, and is available for both diabetics and what UHC calls "pre-diabetics." One supposes that these are folks who, because of genetics and/or lifestyle choices, are more at-risk of developing the disease.
Folks participating in the Diabetes Health Plan receive on-line monitoring and special disease-related educational tools and training. They also receive some diabetes-related meds, including not just insulin but even anti-depressants.
I've asked Stacy about interviewing someone from the plan's development team, and hope to have that set up and posted in the near future. I'd also like to know if there's any chance of porting this program to fully-insured groups down the road; given UHC's stated concern about the "rapidly growing numbers of diabetics and pre-diabetics," one would think that this is on someone's drawing board.
In the meantime, here's a quick video with some background, and an explanation of how the program works:
Posts
