Choose to Own Your Health encourages employees to improve their health and expands upon the current ChooseWell incentive that rewards employees for making healthy choices. This incentive will reward you with $200 for attending a health fair or having a physical with your personal health care provider and completing an online Health Risk Assessment in both 2010 and 2011. An additional $100 will reward you for establishing and achieving your wellness goals.

Detailed information will be available when you complete your online Open Enrollment in November. To view the step-by-step process on how to be eligible for the incentive program, visit the ChooseWell incentive site.

It is important to understand how our wellness results affect our premiums. As a self-insured company each of our medical claims directly affects the premiums we collectively pay in subsequent years. Employee and company premiums are used to fund benefit claims and Anthem serves as our network and claims administrator.

Simply stated, better health means better premiums. We've had success with holding our premiums down and excellent results in the ownership employees have taken for their own health. Choose to Own Your Health is designed to promote an overall healthier, happier work force and will continue to support our goal to maintain affordable health care for our employees.