Today Nissan announced it will be cutting 20,000 jobs. This on the heels of the January job report (another almost 600,000 jobs lost). Is anyone tracking the impact to health from these job losses — both directly (on those who are now unemployed) and indirectly (on those who can see the handwriting on the walls weeks or months before the pink slips are handed out)? Also of interest would be to know the impact of the cratering job market on those connected (both/either by bridge or bond) to the soon-to-be or already unemployed.

Admittedly, the correlation between employment prospects and health is a complex pathway. And the all-in cost of an FTE far exceeds the cost of that individual’s poor health (in all but the rarest of cases). Nevertheless, as the national dialog on health care and its unsustainable cost heats up and we devise means for controlling that cost it would be good to know as much about why we’re paying so much as we can.  Today most of what we hear about that has to do with inefficiencies in the system, advances in medical technology, malpractice insurance and the rising number of uninsured (itself partially a function of falling employment rates). It might make sense to include in this discussion the fact that as a people we are sicker than we could be and suggest some of the big reasons this might be so.