For the past 30 years, federal transportation legislation has allocated a small portion of the national gas tax to transit funding. Under the new five-year bill just passed by the House Committee, guaranteed funding for public transportation systems will disappear, and only roads will be ensured a steady stream of revenue.

House Republicans seem to care more about drivers than transit riders, but they should remember something: public transportation also benefits people who don't use it.

The news of increased hiring in the January jobs report has been greeted as a sign that the US might finally be emerging from the Great Recession. But a look at the kind of hiring that's been on the rise over the past few years raises important questions about the changing nature of the relationship between workers and employers - questions that have serious implications for occupational health and safety as well as workers' financial security.

As the New York Daily News reports, Levin watched as first responders worked in the poisonous cloud of dust in 2001 at the World Trade Center site.

"The city Health Department rebuffed his pleas to issue warnings and an alert to area physicians. So, with Mount Sinai colleagues, he mapped out a plan of treatment for the sick who soon began showing up."

"$5 million in damages from Walmart and two subcontractors, alleging the conditions that led to Santos' electrocution are part of a pattern of unsafe practices at Walmart construction sites, including the hiring of unlicensed contractors and so-called straw men to obtain local permits."

I couldn't help but notice the reference to OSHA's investigation of Mr. Santos' death. Woolhouse indicates that Walmart was not sanctioned by OSHA, but reported that two firms hired by Walmart to perform the work received OSHA citations. Marcy Goldstein-Gelb of the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH) told the Globe reporter how this case illustrates the deficiency in our worker safety regulatory system, where contractors are sanctioned, but their corporate clients are not held accountable.

When I think of chronic illness, diabetes and heart disease are what leap to my mind -- in part because they're so tied to the lifestyle factors of smoking, inadequate exercise, and poor nutrition, and in part because they cost our health system so much money. The IOM report notes that chronic illness represents 75% of the $2 trillion the US spends each year on healthcare, but it also emphasizes that the goal of addressing chronic diseases conditions isn't just to slow the growth of healthcare costs, but to improve quality of life. The report is a response to a request by CDC and the Arthritis Foundation to "help identify ways to reduce disability and improve the function and quality of life for people living with chronic illness."

Another refreshing aspect of this report is that it doesn't just focus on the usual suspects of chronic disease (diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, etc.). While the authors seek to assist health officials in prioritizing the use of limited healthcare dollars, they're also careful to avoid ranking diseases by a single metric. The report highlights nine "clinical clusters" that together "encompass and flesh out the range of key issues that affect the quality of life of patients with the full spectrum of chronic illnesses." Here's my quick summary of the nine conditions, which I hope will encourage some of you check out the full report. (The diseases are described in Section 2 of the report, and the uncorrected proof is currently available for free downloading.)

Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post: Why the poor should concern Romney

Scott Carlson in The Chronicle of Higher Education: America's Health Threat: Poor Urban Design

Maia Szalavitz at Healthland: The Wet House: Homeless People with Alcoholism Drink Less When Booze Is Allowed (Also see Matt Stroud at The Atlantic Cities: Why More Homeless Shelters Should Allow Alcohol)

Matthew Yglesias at Slate: Dirty Money: The astonishing new data showing that simply eliminating inefficient fossil fuel subsidies could achieve half the world's carbon reduction goals

Rafaela von Bredow in Der Spiegel: The Controversial Release of Suicide Mosquitoes

The Center for Public Integrity's Jim Morris, Chris Hamby and others, joined forces with Howard Berkes, Elizabeth Shogren and others to produce "Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities" a series of articles based on a previously undisclosed EPA internal "watch list." The reporters took us into the homes, yards, and town squares of Muscatine, Iowa; Hayden, Arizona; Ponca City, Oklahoma; Chanute, Kansas, and other places to explain how much is known about the serious health hazards in these locales but how little has been done to address them. Our own Lizzie Grossman followed-up on their work to examine how "Chronic polluters are also chronic workplace safety violators."

The Huffington Post and EHS Today both picked up on the story right away, and this morning NPR's Morning Edition aired a story on it. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports:

[Occupational health physician Tee Guidotti] was pleased when, last Valentine's Day, the Department of Labor sent the OMB a new proposal for regulating silica. That office has to review the proposal before it is made public, and that review was supposed to take only 90 days.

As the one-year anniversary approaches, many safety advocates wonder what's holding things up. Records show that officials have held nine private meetings on the issue.

Guidotti went to one, which was requested by a medical group, the American Thoracic Society. He says officials didn't ask too many questions. "But you could tell from what they did ask that they were very well-briefed," Guidotti says. "So they know about this. They know it well."

Most of the other meetings were with industry groups, like the American Chemistry Council's Crystalline Silica Panel.

... A Labor Department spokesman said that OSHA was working with the White House office "to address complex issues related to the costs, benefits and economic impact analyses." This has required "extensive new analyses by OSHA" and additional review, he said, but OSHA would "continue to complete the required steps in the rule-making process as quickly as possible."

The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health has launched a Deadly Dust tumblr with news, information, and video clips on this issue.

In other news:

Joy Jay has the sweetest Southern accent you'll ever hear. It's the kind of accent that makes her news about the state of mental health services in South Carolina harder to hear than usual.

"Mental health has taken some of the biggest (funding) cuts of any agency in the state," said Jay, executive director of Mental Health America of South Carolina. "It's really affected the number of people who can be served -- the door is very narrow now for people with chronic, persistent (mental) illness. And for people with temporary problems, they can't even get into the system; there's no money for them to be served. It's a major, major problem."

From fiscal year 2009 to 2012, South Carolina decision-makers enacted some of the largest reductions to mental health services in the nation, cutting funds by nearly 40 percent, according to a November 2011 report from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). In 2009, more than 95,000 South Carolina residents seeking mental health services were served; in 2011, that number dropped to about 90,000 -- and not because demand went down, Jay said. Jay noted that her organization is now busy building a 14-unit housing project for adults living with mental illness, and 46 people are already on the waiting list. It's the biggest waiting list they've ever had for their housing services, Jay told me.

"I believe we have an obligation to serve our elderly, our children and our disabled and when we don't do that well, we end up with lots of problems," she said. "If we don't spend money on one end, we'll spend it on the other."

To put these new projections from OSHA in perspective, I'll refer to forecasts made previously by the Obama/Solis Administration in 2009 and 2010.

In reference to yesterday's post about cost (among other things), a commenter asked how I could assert ever-rising costs for colleges in the face of flat salaries for faculty.

That's an easy one. Costs include much more than salaries.

The elephant in the room for any discussion of labor costs is health insurance. When the cost of employer-provided insurance goes up, then labor costs go up, even if salaries remain flat. The employee might not feel it, but the employer absolutely does. From the employer's perspective, an increase in the cost of benefits is no different than a raise.

This is why I pull out what little hair I still have whenever I read the New Faculty Majority's advocacy of the "Vancouver model" for paying adjuncts. Vancouver is in Canada. In Canada, health insurance is not attached to employment. If you don't account for that, then you miss the point. Establish single-payer health insurance in America, and we can get a handle on the adjunct compensation issues. Until then, we use adjunct compensation to get a handle on health insurance.

Dean Dad's earlier post reported, "President Obama has put higher education "on notice" that if we keep raising tuition, we'll get our public funding cut." (The post is also well worth a read if you're at all interested in education costs and funding.) But, he goes on to point out, the cost of college is influenced by the cost of healthcare, which has been increasing far more quickly than GDP or inflation.

The Affordable Care Act primarily addresses health insurance coverage. It does have some provisions aimed at reducing costs, but as I wrote earlier this week, we still have a long way to go in figuring out how to reduce costs while maintaining or improving the quality of care.

The fact that rising healthcare costs contribute to cost growth in education -- and, really, in any sector that requires work from a lot of people who get health benefits -- is just one more reminder that failing to address healthcare-cost growth will affect our entire economy.

The tone of this new Obama Administration regulatory statement oozes caution. Let's set aside the fact that this "Fall 2011" regulatory plan was not released at all in the autumn, but on January 20, 2012. It seems the Obama White House wants to steal ammunition from those who claim there are too many new regulations in the pipeline, and also dampen the expectations of those who expected this Administration to aggressively implement more robust public protection rules.

The morning after President Obama's State of the Union speech that featured plans for reinvigorating U.S. manufacturing, Marketplace Morning Report asked former Obama Administration economic advisor Jared Bernstein why a company like Apple doesn't create more jobs in the U.S. "Well," replied Bernstein, "because the infrastructure for consumer electronics - particularly the assembly for consumer electronics - for many decades has been building up in Asia. And they just have a robust, flexible supply chain there that we simply don't have when it comes to consumer electronics."

Thanks to the release of Apple's 2012 Supplier Responsibility report, we now know the names of 156 companies that account for more thank 97 percent of what Apple pays to its suppliers. But this report only scratches the surface when it comes to what makes this consumer electronics infrastructure and supply chain so "flexible" and "robust" from the perspective of a company like Apple.

The signatories on the letter to President Obama, many of whom are members of the Union of Concerned Scientists or the American Public Health Association call the delay extraordinary and "with no indication as to when the review will be concluded and the proposed rule issued." I signed the letter, too. My records indicate that a year-long "review" by the White House of an OSHA proposed health standard is unprecedented since EO 12866 took affect in 1993. Not a distinction the Obama Administration should be proud of, given their predecessor's pitiful record on new protective worker safety regulations.