lborkowski | December 12, 2013Today, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) introduced the Family and Medical Leave Insurance Act, or FAMILY Act, federal legislation to create a "social insurance" system for paid medical and family leave. A new office within the Social Security Administration would administer the system, which would be funded by a payroll tax (two-tenths of one percent of workers' wages, or $1.50 per week for the average worker). Eligible employees could receive 66% of their monthly wages, up to a capped amount, for up to 12 weeks while dealing with their own serious…
lborkowski | December 11, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Andrea Elliott in the New York Times: Invisible Child: Dasani's Homeless Life
Matthieu Aikins in Wired: The Surge: "In 1988 there were 350,000 cases of polio worldwide. Last year there were 223. But getting all the way to zero will mean spending billions of dollars, penetrating the most remote regions of the globe, and facing down Taliban militants to get to the last unprotected children on Earth."
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: MRSA in UK Turkeys Raises Questions of Communication, Transparency and Risk
Elizabeth Weise in USA Today: Diseases on the move…
lborkowski | December 10, 2013A coalition of public-health organizations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, has released a report criticizing most U.S. states for under-investing in smoking prevention and cessation. Broken Promises to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 15 Years Later calculates that states over the past 15 years, states have collected a total of $391 billion from tobacco settlements and tobacco taxes, but spent only 2.3% of that amount on tobacco prevention programs.
The report compares states’ tobacco-prevention expenditures to the levels…
cmonforton | December 9, 2013I spent Sunday morning in the ER of my local community hospital in Hays County, Texas. While my husband lay on the gurney having an IV line inserted, I distracted his attention by conversing with the nurse. I can’t recall what prompted it, but the nurse, Elizabeth, offered her experience with this year’s influenza season.
“I’ve been an ER nurse for 10 years. When it comes to the flu, this year was a lot different. We’ve only seen a handful of cases.”
Like many U.S. hospitals, it's used by the community for primary care.
I asked Elizabeth if she had any ideas to explain why they're not seeing…
kkrisberg | December 6, 2013There are few factors that shape a person’s health as strongly and predictably as income. And while enforcing wage and labor laws may at first seem outside the purview of public health agencies, Rajiv Bhatia adamantly disagrees. In fact, he says that public health may wield the most persuasive stick in town.
Bhatia is the director of environmental health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) and is behind an innovative policy change that uses the agency’s existing regulatory authority to prevent wage theft and support basic labor rights among restaurant workers. Begun in…
cmonforton | December 5, 2013"I played by the rules. I worked to support my family. The unregulated industry virtually destroyed my life. These chemicals that are used on food in large-scale production must be tested, and proper instructions and labels supplied with their sale."
Those were the words of Eric Peoples at a congressional hearing in 2007. He testified about his experience working at a food-manufacturing plant where he was exposed to flavoring chemicals including diacetyl. Those exposures led to severe lung damage. At the time of his testimony, Peoples was awaiting a lung transplant.
Eric Peoples became one of…
egrossman | December 4, 2013On the shopping day known as “Black Friday,” activists held protests at Walmart stores across the country to protest the company’s low wages. In one of the eight press releases the company issued in the 24 hours between Thanksgiving Day and the close of the November 29 “Black Friday,” shopping day, Walmart corporate communications vice president David Tovar stated:
“For our part, we want to be absolutely clear about our jobs, the pay and benefits we offer our associates, and the role retail jobs play in the U.S. economy. Walmart provides wages on the higher end of the retail average with full…
lborkowski | December 3, 2013In May 2010, an explosion at the Black Mag gunpowder-substitute plant in Colebrook, New Hampshire killed employees Jesse Kennett and Don Kendall. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigated and issued 54 citations with penalties totaling $1.2 million. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Health and Safety, said at the time, "Even after a prior incident in which a worker was seriously injured, and multiple warnings from its business partners and a former employee, this employer still decided against implementing safety measures." Safety…
lborkowski | December 2, 2013by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA
President Obama's health reform has been derailed in a collision with health insurance software, but this is hardly a unique experience. In 1995, I was invited to Prague to try to help the Czech Republic reconcile two co-existing public health practice cultures–the hygiene police of the Soviet era and the German tradition of social medicine.
Our delegation found another crisis in the works, around the creation of private health insurance that had started in 1990. Payroll deductions bought private health insurance that covered basic physician and hospital service.…
lborkowski | November 27, 2013Wonkblog's Sarah Kliff has helpfully compiled "A guide to surviving Obamacare debates at Thanksgiving," and it starts off with a good one: "Your mom wants to know whether Obamacare is a total disaster." Kliff's response focuses on the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov, the online marketplace that was supposed to allow for easy health-insurance enrollment for people who need to get coverage. With the website improving but by no means problem-free, the enrollment numbers so far are dismally low. Kliff points out that some states that built their own online marketplaces have successfully…
egrossman | November 26, 2013As Americans prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday and the White House gets ready for President Obama to pardon the National Thanksgiving Turkey in a Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday November 27 that will “reflect upon the time-honored traditions of Thanksgiving,” let us take a moment to reflect upon the welfare of the men and women who process the millions of turkeys on their way to Thanksgiving dinners.
First, according to the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 220,000 people currently work in the poultry processing industry in the US, at an annual median wage…
cmonforton | November 25, 2013The poultry industry must have its head stuck in the chicken coop. With Thanksgiving nearly upon us, the industry is trying to convince the public that poultry-processing plants are great places to earn a living. In just about a week, they’ve issued two written statements insisting they have stellar records on workplace safety. Tom Super, VP of communications for the National Chicken Council, wrote on Nov. 22 at the MeatingPlace blog about recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on workplace injury rates. He noted that the case rate for all reportable injuries in illnesses in…
kkrisberg | November 22, 2013This week, Houston became only the second major city in the U.S. South to pass a law to prevent and punish wage theft. It’s a major victory for all workers, but it’s especially significant for the city’s low-wage workers, who lose an estimated $753.2 million every year because of wage theft.
Passed unanimously by the Houston City Council on Wednesday, the new wage theft ordinance provides workers with a formal process to lodge wage theft complaints and puts in place real penalties for employers convicted of stealing workers’ wages. Businesses convicted of wage theft — either civilly or…
lborkowski | November 22, 2013A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Mariya Strauss in The Nation: Regulations Are Killed, and Kids Die: Under pressure, the Obama administration withdrew rules barring young laborers from dangerous work—a decision with grave consequences for several families.
Maryn McKenna in Medium: Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future: After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely?
Rachel Pearson in the Texas Observer: Texas' Other Death Penalty: A Galveston medical student describes life and death in the…
egrossman | November 21, 2013At least 1.7 million US workers are exposed to respirable crystalline silica each year, this according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). These exposures occur in a variety of industries, among them construction, sandblasting, mining, masonry, stone and quarry work, and in the rapidly expanding method of oil and gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. This exposure can lead to silicosis, an irreversible, and sometimes fatal, lung disease that is only caused by inhaling respirable silica dust. Silica exposure also puts exposed workers at…
cmonforton | November 21, 2013My public health colleague, Adam Finkel, ScD, MPP, received this month the 2013 Alumni Leadership award from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), as part of the school’s 100th birthday celebration. Finkel and I were co-workers in the mid-1990’s at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, where he was the Director of the Office of Health Standards. I learned more from him about risk analysis and risk assessment than in any semester–long course. Why? Because agency risk assessments are not academic exercises when they are used to inform regulatory decisions.
Finkel touched on…
lborkowski | November 19, 2013I've written before about the importance of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion and about the role of community health centers in delivering primary care to underserved patients. With roughly half of the states declining the now-optional Medicaid expansion and an uncertain federal funding environment, though, the extent to which health centers will be able to serve the newly insured is up in the air. A new report from the Geiger Gibson/RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative puts some numbers on the variability. Under different Medicaid expansion and funding scenarios…
cmonforton | November 18, 2013This week will mark the 90-day point of the Labor Department submitting for White House review one of its top priority regulations to protect coal miners' health. It's a rule to prevent black lung disease. The director of the office that conducts those reviews, Howard Shelanski, promised earlier this year during his confirmation hearing that timely review of agencies' regulations would be a top priority. Mr. Shelanski said:
“I absolutely share the concern you just raised about timeliness. ...I recognized that EO 12866 establishes the initial 90 day review process, and it would be one of my…
kkrisberg | November 15, 2013While homelessness among U.S. veterans is on the decline, significant housing challenges remain, according to a new report from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition.
Released this week just a day after Veterans Day, the report finds that in 2011, more than a quarter of the nation’s 20 million veteran households experienced a housing cost burden (defined as spending more than 30 percent of income on housing costs and utilities) and more than 1.5 million veterans were severely cost burdened (spending more than half of their incomes on housing costs and utilities). Within those numbers,…
lborkowski | November 15, 2013Last week, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) released a proposed rule that would make public much of the injury and illness data employers are already required to collect. Large employers (those with 250 or more employees) would be required to electronically submit their injury and illness records to OSHA each quarter. In certain industries with high injury and illness rates, establishments with 20 or more employees would have to submit summary data to OSHA on an annual basis. "OSHA plans to eventually post the data online, as encouraged by President Obama's Open…