A Louisiana employer’s health perks helped their workers lose weight. Here’s how. – InsuranceNewsNet

At 330 pounds, Gregg Schenck had tried just about every diet by age 56.

For a while, some of them worked. But always, the weight came back.

He knew he needed to make a permanent change. He couldn’t get down on the floor to play with his young granddaughter. He wanted to go to Disney World with her but worried about squeezing into an airline seat.

So when the software developer got an email from his company in Nov. 2021 about a new weight loss program, he seized upon it.

“That’s my lifeline,” he thought to himself.

Schenck is now one of the dozens of workers part of a health program focusing on a low-carb diet at Laitram, a Louisiana manufacturing company that got its start in 1947 with the first patent for a shrimp peeling machine. The company now produces a range of machinery and employs shift workers as well as tech workers. Through the program and a number of other Silicon Valley-esque health benefits that include subsidized salads and on-site medical workers, Laitram slowed the growth in its health insurance costs, which had increased by an average of 10% per employee from 2009 to 2011 to around a 3% increase after 2012.

The approach could be a blueprint for other large companies in Louisiana, where health insurance costs are among the highest in the nation, according to a report from Forbes Advisor. Louisiana had the fifth-highest increase in overall health care spending per person between 2016 and 2020 at 23%. Only New York, Hawaii, South Dakota and California saw…