Companies often give employees price discounts for purchasing company products.
For instance, Lenovo, which bought IBM's personal-computer line in 2005, allows employees to buy Thinkpad tablets and other gadgets for a discount.
Several large pharmaceutical companies with operations in this area go beyond discounts and provide their prescription products with no co-payment to employees who have a script, and the reason is simple: profit.
Opaque pricing is one of the systematic mysteries of American health care and, in various marketplaces, pharmaceutical companies are no different from other companies in using such situations to maximize profits.
But as employers, pharmaceutical companies are also no different from widget- or carmakers in wanting to keep employee health-care costs low. The drug industry - like many doctors - is a proponent of patients taking medication prescribed by a physician.
This idea helps Big Pharma in at least two ways.
Greater volume usage of a product is almost always a good thing for a company, and drugmakers are no different, albeit with the requisite safety concerns.
And if employees use drugs in properly prescribed ways, it might prevent a worse medical condition, a more expensive medical condition.
"We want to keep employees healthy," said Rick DeOliveira, GlaxoSmithKline's U.S. director of benefits. "Prescription medicines can prevent the need for more expensive procedures. If people are prescribed anti-hypertensive or cholesterol medicine, we want them to take them because it can prevent a heart attack or a stroke."
Glaxo is a global company based in London but has 1,300 employees in Center City - until they move to a new facility under construction at the Navy Yard.
Many big companies are self-insured, and they spread the costs among hundreds or thousands of employees. They often pay outside firms to administer health plans and sometimes a separate pharmacy-benefits manager to handle the prescription-drug plan.
Employees usually contribute some portion of their wages, and pay varying costs for services, including through co-payments. But, for example, if a higher-than-normal number of employees have long hospital stays or expensive surgeries, the company often pays more in a given year.
That's why companies encourage employees to exercise, stop smoking, and take cholesterol-reducing medication.
