Countering Workplace Wellness Bias Through Wellness-Legal Partnerships.

In the current United States economy, wellness is predominantly marketed to society's privileged individuals, catering to a mostly white and high-income clientele. When marginalized communities encounter wellness services, such as in the workplace, they are faced with an implicitly biased industry. These biases include an emphasis on individual behavior change without considering social determinants of health (SDOH), cultural appropriation of wellness activities for capitalistic gain, use of biased health measures like Body-Mass Index (BMI), and constant images of and expectations of achieving a stereotypical healthy body.

Making the Health Insurance Flexibility and Accountability (HIFA) waiver work through collaborative governance.

This paper argues that collaborative governance should be an essential component in any HIFA waiver proposal, due to the fact that the health care system is moving away from a federal and hierarchical program design and implementation towards a more local, collaborative approach. As several current collaborative projects demonstrate, collaboration may overcome barriers to health expansion program success, such as stakeholder buy-in, notice, and state access to private health coverage information. Furthermore, collaboration within the context of the HIFA waiver process may maximize the strengths of current collaborations, such as providing: (a) access to greater and more stable funding sources; (b) access to a facilitator that can collect and distribute data; and (c) an avenue for accountability.