Fortune 500 companies across America are kicking off major wellness initiatives that aim to improve employee health and cut medical costs.  These programs, which are being implemented by organizations such as Scotts Miracle-Gro, IBM, and Microsoft were the subject of a recent Business Week cover story and involve employee discounts on health-care premiums, free weight-loss and smoking-cessation programs, gratis gym memberships, and counseling for emotional problems.  Companies like Scotts hire firms like Whole Health Management, which oversees on-site primary care and corporate fitness centers in addition to aggregating health and insurance claim data in order to deduce employee trends.

Business Week tells the story of Joe Pellegrini, a supply-chain executive at Scotts who got nagged by an employer-sponsored health coach to see his doctor immediately due to warning signs pertaining to his heart.  A few weeks later, a specialist studying Pellegrini's angiogram spotted the heart valve of what should have been a dead man. Within hours, two stents were installed. The surgeons later told him the 95% blockage would have killed him within five days.

As part of its wellness initiative, Scotts went tobacco-free last fall, and the company was dead serious about it.  Scotts did whatever it took to get current employees to quit, including paying for counseling, Nicorette, prescription drugs, and hypnosis.  If you couldn’t hack it, you were invited to work somewhere else.

Says CEO Jim Hagedorn:  “My view is we choose not to employ smokers because it comes right down to us saying that as a culture we care about our people and we are not going to tolerate suicidal behavior. If we had somebody running around saying I'm going to commit suicide, we'd call an ambulance and take them away. They have a problem and they need help. To me, what I think is missing in this debate about wellness is that it is O.K. for a company to say we care about our people, and we choose not to have our folks behave in a way that's going to be heartbreaking.”

Are companies like Scotts going too far, or just far enough?  Healthcare in America has no doubt reached a crisis point, but whose responsibility is to it ensure that you get the medical attention you need…your company’s or yours?