By AL LEWIS

Last month Aon, the major benefits consulting firm, released a “study” claiming:

A significant opportunity to reduce healthcare costs for employers and enhance overall workforce health through a comprehensive obesity management program that includes GLP-1 medications.

This, of course, is the opposite of what most researchers have shown.  And in the immortal words of the great philosophers Dire Straits: “Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.” We’ll shortly see who’s wrong (um, meaning about weight loss drugs) when we dive into the study in a minute. But first, let’s review Aon’s previous analyses. 

A brief history of Aon

Aon claimed that Accolade saved 8%, but it looks like they must coincidentally have been absent both on the day that the biostatistics professor explained how control groups work, and also on the day the fifth-grade math teacher explained how averages work. 

Then, they claimed that Lyra – which is a mental health company – achieved the following non-mental improvements in the set of patients who had at least one mental health encounter with one of their “220,000 high-quality providers”:

§  A 30% reduction in non-mental health-related ER visits

§  A 30% reduction in generic drug spending

§  A 20% reduction in specialty drug spending

Thanks in part to starting the y-axis at $4000 to improve the optics, Aon also revealed that Lyra achieved a very high “efficiency ratio”:

I can’t object to that finding because – despite three decades in this field, about 100 articles/interviews/quotes/citations including the Wall Street Journal, two trade-bestselling books and one Harvard Business School case study – I still don’t know what an “efficiency ratio” is, other than that has nothing to do with comparing participants to non-participants in a mental health study. Apparently an “efficiency ratio” in healthcare measures how quickly a hospital turns over its inventory. So Aon’s use of the term recalls the immortal words of the great philosopher Bob Uecker: “Juuussst a bit outside.”

When publicly and privately asked to explain any of these things, Aon clammed up. That was likely wise on their part.