It’s in companies’ best interest to employ healthy workers. People who show up early, feeling energized throughout the day, generally produce work of a higher quality than people who slog into the office an hour late, engorge themselves with a large lunch, and fumble through their afternoon tasks. So, it’s easy to understand the appeal of workplace wellness programs.

The trouble is, they rarely work — or at least to the degree the employer envisions. But that hasn’t stopped companies from trying. A 2013 analysis by the RAND Corporation found half of all companies with 50 or more employees use some sort of wellness program, whether it’s an incentive program that rewards healthy behavior or a punitive system that penalizes unhealthy lifestyles, like smoking and not exercising. But the research that exists on these programs suggests costs don't actually go down.

The reason they don’t go down is that many of the costs associated with the programs drive unnecessary health screenings that rely too much on outside care. They also tend to favor employers over employees when it comes to savings. Obamacare, for its part, lets this happen. Employers can now charge a 30-percent higher premium to employees who fall outside the parameters for health-contingent programs, and charge smokers 50-percent higher premiums.

The best news, ironically, may come from a PepsiCo initiative in 2003. An analysis of the seven years following the program’s introduction showed disease-specific health care costs did go down. The problem, to some experts, is that these reductions don’t translate to overall wellness in the short term, which wouldn't be problematic if not for the fact this is the entire point of wellness programs in the first place.